SATURDAY RUBRICS: 7/12/25
CLARA RUGAARD, MERYL STREEP, JOE PAPP, PENELOPE WILTON, AND DEREK JACOBI
STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS: Clara Rugaard photographed by Greg Williams
The RUBRICS this weekend are a day late because I spent most of Friday at a dress rehearsal for The Cherry Orchard here in Tangier and watched director Rob Ashford work with his stunning array of actors in the cast which included Gillian Anderson, Luke Thallon, Samuel West, Penelope Wilton, Michelle Dockery, Derek Jacobi, and Alison Oliver. I was familiar with the onstage and onscreen work of all those cast members, but my discovery that day was Clara Rugaard who was portraying the maid, Dunyasha. That reminded me of the first production of The Cherry Orchard I ever saw back during my own acting days when I attended Juilliard’s Drama Division in the mid-1970s. Across the way in Lincoln Center was a production at the Vivian Beaumont being presented by Joe Papp and The Public Theatre which was directed by Andrei Serban. It starred the great Irene Worth as Madame Ranevskaya. Her last scene when she says goodbye to her home became heightened into ritual, ancient yet entirely new. It is one of those moments in the theatre I will never forget and was a kind of ritualized initiation itself into my love of the art form whether I was on a stage or experiencing it in that oddly communal way that a theatre audience experiences theater - with each other and completely alone - which is, come to think of it, how I live my life now as a pilgrim within the wider world.
This is how Walter Kerr wrote about it when he too claimed it was something he would never forget in its indelibleness: “Irene Worth is the Madame Ranevskaya of the occasion, and I could delay us here with an accounting of dozen or two swiftly telling gestures this unforgettable actress has devised by way of showing us the obtuseness, the sudden fierce sense, the self‐indulgence and the genuine dismay of an extraordinarily complex woman. She has to do it in snatches, for reasons I'll get to; but she does it. The single inspiration I'm going to cling to, because it the boldest, is her last loving look at the house she is leaving. There is, by the way, no real house to leave; Mr. Serban, brilliantly abetted by designer Santo Loquasto, has given us only an enormous void, an infinity of plain canvas, a place in which eagles might exercise their freedom. And so Miss Worth doesn't look at it, she inhales it, moving in a great running circle deep, deep into the unreachable horizon and then around and forward to encompass the curve of the forestage, not panting but sucking in breath as she flies, reaching out at last to grasp the hand of the companion waiting to take her away. But she doesn't seize that hand. Instead, on impulse, she barely brushes it with her fingers and dances off again on another grand tour, eyes ablaze, lungs filled, heart broken, lips parted in what is very nearly an all‐devouring smile. And then she does it one more triumphant, unbelievable time, a bareback rider on the rim of the world. When she goes, she takes it all with her.”
The other great memory of that production is my discovery of Meryl Streep who played the maid and did so as a slapstick clown with such finesse and star quality, I remember reopening my program to check to see who exactly she was. It was the moment I memorized her name. I told all this to Clara who was so lovely in her own singular way in the same role. On Friday, I memorized her name. I suggest you do too.
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