The Cherry Tree review by Callie Stribling

It’s clear that Emma Schwartz’s production of Bruce Lawder’s The Cherry Tree knows what it wants to be. It’s a family drama by way of Chekhov. It’s three women, a divorcee and her two daughters, trying to figure out who they are and what their place in the world is, particularly in the midst of economic hardships. How to survive and be true to themselves as independent woman in the world. The direction, performances, and design are all seamless in bringing this stylized script to the stage with the same language. It’s crafted well and credit is due to Schwartz’s direction that this world is all so cohesive.

Where some of the confusion comes for me is when the play tries to frame so strongly the issues of these three women as the issue of women without men (or at least more specifically husbands) seemingly in the modern day.

Far be it from me to deny that we women still have it harder than men in a lot of ways. We absolutely do still face a lot of pressure to find a man, settle down, and have children. And we absolutely still have to work harder to be taken as seriously as men. The last thing I would ever want to do is belittle the experiences that women face that add up to layer upon layer of belittlement. But when Madelaine (played by Katherine Wessling) talks about her two daughters needing a husband specifically “who can take charge” or how she didn’t think about how different it would be for her daughters than for her with the expectations of jobs and relationships, it just doesn’t strike me as something a woman who (assuming we are meant to take the setting to be modern day  2023) would have been raising children in the 1980’s wouldn’t have thought about.

What the script does look at in an interesting manner, however, is the effect of family arguments and expectations and the pressure it puts on the children. Sisters Melanie and Michelle (Allison Landi and Maya Murphy) grew up with two parents who fought all the time and a mother who has specific ideas and images of her girls and who they should be. Their different reactions to that are interesting to see in comparison.

Madeline, Melanie, and Michelle are all fascinating characters that this cast has done a great job fleshing out. You get a feel for who each one is from the very top of the show. The pacing is tight enough to keep the show moving. Gabriella Bonifacio’s set design gives a full feeling to the stage to create their home. And again, everything under Schwartz comes to a cohesive and well managed big picture. The Cherry Tree is a show with a lot of potential to be done really well with a good team like the one this production has. But ultimately parts of it just didn’t stick the landing and fully resonate with me personally.