BABA YAGA SOARS AND ROARS AT THE CHERRY

Written by Debra Fried, Cornell English Professor Emerita

“Good manners opens many doors,” as young Vasilisa recalls the wise advice given her by a grateful talking crow. So please go to the door of the Cherry Artspace on Cherry Street. The modest building stands by the Inlet and, at present, sprouts no chicken feet, nor can it dance, cluck, or wiggle. Or lay an egg. To brighten a midwinter hour, the flock at the Cherry has just popped out another magic mirror. Peer in and see wonders.

The Cherry is an intimate performance space. But this week, inside there’s a forest, a snowstorm, a raging river, and a burgeoning mountain range. And if you open the door, you’ll meet a girl, her mother and father, her stepmother, a wolf, a bear, a crow, and a witch. A few other incidental figures will gallop in and out, like day and night. Together they’ll tell you a story that’s about many things. One of them is this: what you’re warned might eat you can, if you have the right mirror, comb, and handkerchief, turn out to elevate you. Start out by being brave. When you meet on the prowl a talking wolf with a thorn in its paw, you’ll know what to do.

The story is basic, as a folktale should be, and the folktale pattern of things that come in threes is both reassuring and, as each unfolds, surprising: forest visitors and magic objects, and chores and tasks, and perhaps even mothers. What does young Vasilisa (Lucy Purnine) do when her lovely, warmly inventive mother (Sylvie Yntema) who turns housework into games, is replaced by a dour stepmother (Barbara Geary) without that spirit of playful sharing? Vasilisa does what any hearty, sensible folktale child does: she brings light to the family through pluck, imagination, courtesy, cleverness, kindness, and recalling the gifts her wise mother left for her.

You go many places in the under-an-hour adventure with the Cherry ensemble’s Baba Yaga under the sparkling direction of Jen Pearcy-Edwards. What’s Baba Yaga? A Russian folktale. Who is Baba Yaga? Hints: lives alone in the woods; house has a fence of bones and lit-eyed grinning skulls; cackles, flies, eats kids: sound familiar? This Baba Yaga (Mara Neimanis) is amazingly airborne and ornery at once. She’s a figure familiar from other folktales, here funny in her swaggering appetite for food and for assigning impossible chores for a child to do. Neimanis is commanding as the most rude, forthright, funny-scary, and acrobatic Amelia Earhart of irascible woodland hags. But despite Baba Yaga’s hilarious, oversized diva self-assurance (“The legend stands before you!”), Neimanis, while she whips around up over the stage, does not upstage the ensemble she’s part of. The whole group’s organic responsiveness to the tale’s turns and twists is a consummate pleasure of this comic and visually improvisatory retelling.

There are many moments of joyously fun shape-shifting of actors, roles, and place in the show. Sylvia Yntema is warmly protective as the mother, prowling and comically smug as the wolf. Co-scenarist and story consultant Arthur Groys as the father, and a nervous, bill-shifting crow with a bum wing brings a nervous, lean presence (and a somehow perfectly ornithological r-rolling Russian accent) that is riveting. Barbara Geary is a bear of a grouchy, smirking stepmother and a hungry bear of a grateful helper to Vasilisa, and she’s funny as both. Lucy Purnine’s Vasilisa is the perfect plucky storybook child in jumper and all-purpose shoulder satchel, ready for anything and never cutesy or a parody of a child, but wholly there as the eager, resourceful heroine whose fate we want to know. In some ways Purnine has the toughest role because Vasilisa has to be the quiet, firm, challenged yet confident center of the whole swirling maelstrom, and Purnine’s Lucy has the charm and defiance of a child we root for. Yntema as the thoughtfully sympathetic mother one moment and the crouching sly wolf the next shines as the true theater animal she is, having last appeared in this space as a romping, chomping sheep in Rosa and Blanca, and memorably, two summers back, as a merry, resilient Rosalind in Samuel Buggeln’s under-a-tent staging of As You Like It. The story of Baba Yaga, like many folktales, is (as professors tediously tend to say) an essay on mothering, or nurturing and maturing, and throughout the evening Yntema weaves in and out of being the remembered mother who continues to guide Vasilisa, and not only by making her a doll to tend to and to ask for help. The whole ensemble tells the story and engineers many of the effects before our eyes. We watch the company invent Vasilisa’s adventure as though improvising around a fire, and you will be glad to warm yourself at The Cherry’s hearth.

Or to cool yourself . . . When the snowstorm rages to blow the angry, child-pursuing witch around the sky, the Cherry is transformed. We are all whirled up and around in the swirling blizzard as Baba Yaga swims in the winds. Neimanis’s aerialist magic is used relative sparingly in the show and always to animate and propel the tale forward. Like many of the show’s mercurial low-tech bedazzlements of high-energy inventiveness, this blizzard carries you to that other-place-right-at-home as only live stage performance can do. Equally touching, and a note of elemental pure theater, are the moment when Vasilisa’s lost mother appears, with a few good words reminding her daughter of what she already knows, in the same space as the stepmother who has replaced her. The warm ghost of the mother who is gone is simply there in the person of the performer: memory as virtual presence, as the others we take with us always are. Logically, we cannot see both the dead mother and the new stepmother in the same space. But the logic of legend is at work here. Vasilisa’s journey has to sweep her into the world, aided by but beyond the mother she has lost, visiting the ‘bone mother’ Baba Yaga, to return reconciled to her new stepmother. To see all three mothers present, in various forms, as Vasilisa meets the fairytale challenges, is to revel in basic theatrical invention. It requires no special effects. It’s in the primal theatrical bravura of the scenario, but such moments if done simply are always moving.

Cue a little ode to the power of role-doubling: The helpful wolf, bear, and crow, are also mother, stepmother, and father. I don’t know what ‘also’ means there, exactly; it’s the special ‘also’ of theater that can be inflected to suggest many kinds of relationships. Small troupes create bigger meanings when roles are doubled in this way. It’s the ‘also’ of folktales, I suppose, where the magic creature derives somehow from a domestic detail: the wishful thinking of the unhappy child makes magical fiction happen. No need to traipse over the stage the scholarly slush about how folktales and nursery rhymes work, how they create psychological truth from dreamy nonsense and fabled characters. All I mean to say is this: last night, the Cherry cast and crew really got the cow to jump over the moon, so to speak, and the dish to run away with the spoon. And Baba Yaga both to fly and to come down to earth. That takes stage expertise of a rare kind, and we in Ithaca are as lucky as Vasilisa with her wise advisers, to have that in our upstate snowy woods.

So far you can’t tell why this show is for everyone, why the Cherry’s Baba Yaga is anything but some of the less-than-inviting things ‘for all ages’ might conjure up. After all, the Cherry’s reputation is built on edgy Continental translations and heady, super-smart, allusive experimental plays like George Kaplan, and more recently Carbon and Rosa and Blanca. Oh, wait, those too were funny-scary, theatrically dynamic, rich in stage-serious and stage-silly presto-changos, and anything but pretentious even though tussling with big questions. In the same way, the Cherry’s current show really is for everyone. If ‘for all ages’ makes you allergic, fear not. Baba Yaga is not twee, precious, sentimental, saccharine, or Disneyfied. It’s elemental theater with shadow-puppetry, funky sound effects, music, song, video projections that are storybook-retro and immersive. The main tools that the ensemble uses to tell the tale, though, are the performers and their quicksilver changes.

The whole is a beautiful, dynamic, swirling circus of theatrical savvy and directed by Pearcy-Edwards it orchestrates its stylishly irreverent fifty-ish minutes with – here stalks into the prose forest one of those snarly formulations – narrative intelligence. The cast is backed by a wonderful crew of gifted professionals: Isaac Sharp’s music and sound effects, Claire Chesne’s lighting design, the delightfully clever story-book projections facilitated by Norm Scott of the shadow puppets of Rosalina Maassen, and Mo Dransoff’s simple, shaggy, and funny costumes. Claire Mannle’s scene design and magical props place us in a storybook world and Robin Guiver (the grumpy Dwarf of Rosa and Blanca, though behind the scenes for this woodsy-grove excursion) guides bodies and things to move with a beautiful coherence and comedy. In the Baba Yaga world, when is a prop a costume or a part of the set? When is a baggy apron a belly? When is a house a chicken? Who knows, we are in the land of children’s fables and folk wisdom and of theater-makers working seamlessly together to tell an old story in new and old ways, so watch out for that squawking peak-roofed house, the one with the door that opens to ‘Please.’

The show undergoes many shifts in a varied, swift fifty-five minutes, as Vasilisa seeks out Baba Yaga to help solve a problem. But it remains coherent in tone and tale. It’s goofy and pops with surprises every minute. It doesn’t take itself seriously, it doesn’t pontificate, preach, or talk down to its audience of any age. It might try to eat you, but it might instead feed you, if you are a hungry bear in the woods or an Ithacan thirsty for a brief voyage to another time and place that is also always now. Who doesn’t feel like that when our upstate mid-winter long nights become a grouchy-bear hibernation slushfest of cabin fever? As Vasilisa’s mother advises her, “Morning is wiser than evening,” and Baba Yaga has matinees as well as evening performances. Enter the forest cabin where Vasilisa lives for a quick cure for cabin fever. The play cheers and uplifts.

Like the best folk fantasies, the Cherry’s Baba Yaga is an argument for why we need that imaginative sliver of daylight between everyday bleak groundedness and the world of thinking-otherwise in art. Without giving anything away, a magical moment, gentle and simple and yet prepared for through the whole show without one realizing it, comes when that daylight, that moment of ungrounded magic, happens for Vasilisa. And for you, too, because by that time, you’re rooting for the imperiled child who braves it out. She rises to the challenge in a memorable hour at The Cherry that is, like Vasilisa, brave, kind, and clever. The show has a nice afterglow too, that you’ll carry with you into the snowy night or afternoon. You will want to meet Vasilisa and her family and woodland neighbors, especially as they are our theatrical neighbors, Ithaca’s unofficial repertory company that lurks in the mysterious backstage woods and emerges onstage at seasonal intervals to growl, prowl, and rouse us.

The show is a great introduction to theater for a child of almost any age, though it’s true that when Baba Yaga makes her entrance she’s like a ragged, howling storm and you’d have to be as ancient as the witch herself not to cringe back in surprised delight as she swoops in. You’ll have to judge how old your child would have to be to know both to giggle and grimace at that dramatic arrival. But then it’s Vasilisa, the child with questions, who goes in search of the thing that terrifies. That’s how to tame life, at any age. If you can endure the witch’s farts, you can do anything, even outsmart your way into a happy life in the woods without the mother who gave you the magic doll you can ask for help when you need it.

Here lopes in the optional fancy-shmancy tame-wolfish allegory part of this review: the magic doll is theater. Feed it when it’s hungry, give it a drink when it’s thirsty, and when you’re lost, ask it for help. Go to the Cherry Artspace and feed it, too, because it’s a local resource, an ever-shifting modest house of make-believe – small but with professionally expansive stage energies – tucked away in the woods, by the magic Inlet, behind Wegmans. It can become anywhere, from the Forest of Arden (As You Like It) to a dystopian future (Carbon) and to the deep dark woods of folk legends for grown-ups gone haywire (Rosa and Blanca) or childhood classics gone high-wire with Babe Yaga. Anything can happen in the woods of the Cherry. Maybe you, like Vasilisa, didn’t know that a wolf or a bear, or even a wounded crow, can talk. But Vasilisa figures out that they always did talk, and now she has chosen to listen.

2021:

12/15/21 – AMERICAN THEATRE – “If You Live Stream It, Will They Watch?” – Review of And What Happens If I Dont

12/08/21 – THIS WEEK IN NEW YORK – “And What Happen If I Don’t” – Review of And What Happens If I Dont

12/05/21 – THINKING THEATER NYC – You Should See “And What Happens If I Don’t” No Matter What Your Mother Says – Review of And What Happens If I Dont

11/03/21 – ITHACA TIMES – “Cherry Street: The Transformation Of A Neighborhood” – story about The Arthaus, Cherry Gallery and Cherry Studio

2018:

11/13/18 – THE ITHACAN – “Cherry Artspace Pays Homage To Vaudeville Performances” – preview of La Cerise Noire and interview with the artists

10/18/18 – ITHACA TIMES – “Adapting Conditions – Uncommon Installation Art Featured at The Cherry” – review of Adapting Conditions

10/5/18 – BROADWAY WORLD – “The Performative Self and The Cherry Arts Present Screening of Leeny Sack’s The Survivor and The Translator” – preview of The Survivor And The Translator

9/26/18 – ITHACA TIMES – “Questioning Reality – George Kaplan Captures the Evolution of Revolution” – review of George Kaplan

9/19/18- WSKG – “The Cherry Arts Presents a Play that is Both A Thriller And A Comedy” (listen!) – interview with Sam Buggeln about George Kaplan

9/19/18- ITHACA JOURNAL – “George Kaplan continues Cherry Arts season in Ithaca – preview of George Kaplan

9/12/18 – ITHACA TIMES – “Cherry Arts Walking Play” – review of The Missing Chapter

8/30/18 – WSKG – “Opera Ithaca Performs at The Cherry” – interview with conductor Keith Chambers about Opera Ithaca’s presentation of Ambrose Thomas’ adaptation of Hamlet

8/21/18 – CORNELL ARTS & SCIENCES – “New Immersive Headphone Play Premieres This Month” – preview of The Missing Chapter

8/20/18 – ITHACA TIMES – “Ithaca’s Cinematic Past: Ithaca Spots That Were Seen, Not Heard” – story about Wharton Studio history and preview of The Missing Chapter

8/13/18 – TOMPKINS WEEKLY – “Upcoming Season at The Cherry Mixes New with Tried and True” – preview of 2018-19 Season

7/11/18 – CATSKILL MOUNTAIN NEWS – “Franklin Stage Company’s Bitter Banquet” – review of The Cherry’s production of Bitter Banquet at Franklin Stage Company

7/3/18 – BINGHAMTON NEW YORK NEWS – “Bitter Banquet Launches Franklin Stage Company Season” – review of The Cherry’s production of Bitter Banquet at Franklin Stage Company

6/16/18 – BROADWAY WORLD – “Cherry Hires New General Manager Laura Miller” – announcement of first full-time company hire

5/11/18 – ITHACA TIMES – “Drama Across Borders Takes Ithaca” – preview of Drama Across Borders Theatre Conference

4/18/18 – ITHACA TIMES – “From Land To Land” – preview of art installation by Dehanza Rogers

4/8/18 – CORNELL CHRONICLE – “Nobel Laureate’s Autobiographical Play to be Presented in Ithaca” – preview of Something That Belongs To You by Holocaust Survivor Roald Hoffmann

3/29/18 – WSKG RADIO – “The Cherry Arts presents House Of Usher” (listen!) – interview with House Of Usher creator Anna Coogan

3/28/18 – ITHACA TIMES – “Poe-tent Theatre at The Cherry” – interview with House Of Usher creator Anna Coogan

3/27/18 – WHCU RADIO – Morning Newswatch with Lee Rayburn – “Anna Coogan & the House Of Usher” (listen!) – interview with Anna Coogan on House Of Usher

3/27/18 – ITHACA JOURNAL – “Anna Coogan & TZAR Reprise House Of Usher at the Cherry Artspace” – preview of House Of Usher and interview with the creators

3/4/18 – CORNELL DAILY SUN – “What’s Your Rule Of Thumb? World Premiere of Thematically Rich Play” – review of Rule Of Thumb

2/28/18 – ITHACA TIMES – “Rule Of Thumb Captures Challenges and Culture Brilliantly – review of Rule Of Thumb

2/21/18 – ITHACA TIMES – “Hitching A Ride – Serbian Play has its World Premiere at The Cherry – preview of Rule Of Thumb

3/27/18 – WHCU RADIO – Morning Newswatch with Lee Rayburn – “Swedish Hitchhikers at the Cherry Arts” (listen!) – interview with Helen T. Clark and Darcy Rose of Rule Of Thumb

2/13/18 – CORNELL CHRONICLE – “PMA Professor Directs International Production at The Cherry – interview with Rule Of Thumb director Beth F. Milles

2/13/18 – ITHACA JOURNAL – “Rule Of Thumb has World Premiere at Cherry Arts in Ithaca” – preview of Rule Of Thumb

2017:

12/6/17 – ITHACA TIMES – “The Snow Queen 2.0” – Preview of The Snow Queen

12/5/17 – ITHACA JOURNAL – “Cherry Arts Stages ‘Snow Queen’ in New Artspace” – preview of The Snow Queen

9/20/17 –WHCU RADIO – Morning Newswatch with Lee Rayburn – “What Happens Next at The Cherry Arts” (listen!) – interview with Erica Steinhagen & Sam Buggeln about What Happens Next

9/15/17 – ITHACA TIMES – “Curtains Rise on The Cherry, a unique addition to Ithaca’s theatre scene” – preview of the Cherry Artspace and What Happens Next

http://whcuradio.com/morning-newswatch/what-happens-at-the-cherry-arts/

9/13/17 – ITHACA JOURNAL – “Cherry Arts Christens New Space with What Happens Next” – preview of Artspace Grand Opening and What Happens Next

9/11/17 – TOMPKINS WEEKLY – “The Cherry Artspace: Tompkins County’s Newest Performance Venue Ready for its Closeup” – preview of Artspace Grand Opening and What Happens Next

8/31/17 – ITHACA TIMES – “Storm Country Masterfully Reinvents Theatre” – review of Storm Country

8/24/17 –WSKG RADIO – Classical with Bill Snyder – “Storm Country is a New Kind of Theatre Experience” (listen!) – interview with Sam Buggeln about Storm Country

http://wskg.org/arts/storm-country-is-a-new-kind-of-theatre-experience/

8/23/17 –WHCU RADIO – Lee Rayburn’s Morning Newswatch – “Step Into Storm Country with the Cherry Arts” (listen!) – interview with Sam Buggeln about Storm Country

8/23/17 – ITHACA VOICE – “Cherry Artspace Getting Ready for Grand Opening” – preview of the Cherry’s 2017-18 grand opening season in the new Cherry Artspace venue, and What Happens Next

7/13/17 – ITHACA TIMES – “The Cherry Artspace Intermingles Art Forms” – preview of the new Cherry Artspace and Summer 2017 programming

5/7/17 – TOMPKINS WEEKLY – “Cherry Arts’ STORM COUNTRY Offers West-End Fiction” – review of Storm Country

5/3/17 – ITHACA TIMES – “Argentine Playwright is Bold and Real in Two One-Acts” – review of Loza Plays

4/25/17 – BROADWAY WORLD – “Celebrated Arts Orgs to Collaborate on FOUR PLAYS – 100 YEARS: A Celebration of Women’s Suffrage” – preview of 4 Plays – 100 Years

4/18/17 – ITHACA JOURNAL – “Cherry Arts Stages Two Santiago Loza Plays at CSMA” – interview with Sam Buggeln on Loza Plays

4/18/17 – ITHACA VOICE – “Cherry Introduces Argentine Writer to Ithaca Audiences in Loza Plays” – preview of Loza Plays

4/14/17 – LANSING STAR – “Loza Plays Staged By Cherry Arts” – preview of Loza Plays

1/20/17 – ITHACA TIMES – “Looking Back on 2016: The Year’s Best in Local Theatre”

1/20/17 – ITHACATING IN CORNELL HEIGHTS – “The Cherry Artspace Construction Update” – blog

♦

2016:

12/23/16 – ITHACA TIMES – “The Snow Queen dazzles at the Kitchen Theatre” – review of The Snow Queen

12/14/16 – ITHACA TIMES – “Trip Out with The Cherry’s The Snow Queen” – preview of The Snow Queen

12/13/16 – ITHACA JOURNAL – “Frozen Majesty: Cherry Arts stages Snow Queen at The Kitchen” – preview of The Snow Queen

12/9/16 – CORNELL CHRONICLE – “New Theatre with Cornell Connections Rises on the Inlet – Interview with Nick Salvato about The Snow Queen

12/8/16 – WHCU RADIO – Lee Rayburn’s Morning Newswatch – “Meet The Snow Queen” (listen!) – Interview with Erica Steinhagen about The Snow Queen

12/4/16 – WICB RADIO – “Best Of Broadway” (listen!) – Interview with Robin Mazer and Sydney Hill about The Snow Queen

11/28/2016 – “ITHACATING IN CORNELL HEIGHTS – “The Cherry Artspace Construction Update” – blog

11/1/16 – COMMUNITY ARTS PARTNERSHIP NEWS – “The Cherry and Sam Get Grants!” – Interview with Sam Buggeln

9/16/16 – WHCU RADIO – Lee Rayburn’s Morning Newswatch – “The Cherry’s Storm Country” (listen!) – Interview with Sam Buggeln about Storm Country

9/13/16 – WRFI RADIO – “Speaking About Storm Country, a Headphone Play” (listen!) – Interview with Sam Buggeln and preview of Storm Country

9/13/16 – ITHACA JOURNAL – “Headphone Play Leads Listeners on Audio Adventure” – Review of Storm Country

9/9/16 – ITHACA JOURNAL – “Photo Gallery: ‘Storm Country’ Headphone Play Leads Listeners on Adventure” – Photo Gallery of the Storm Country experience

9/9/16 – LANSING STAR – “Innovative Ithaca-based Audio Walking Play” – Press Release

9/8/16 – ITHACA TIMES – “Immersion with Headphones: The Cherry’s Second Season Starts with Unique Play” – Review of Storm Country

9/7/16 – ITHACA TIMES – “Theatre Without Walls: Cherry Arts Makes the World your Very Own Space” – Interview with Sam Buggeln and preview of Storm Country

9/6/16 – CORNELL CHRONICLE – “Novel, Local History Inspires Faculty-Written Headphone Play” – Interview with Nick Salvato & Aoise Stratford about Storm Country

9/2/16 – ONSTAGE/OFFSTAGE PODCAST – “Samuel Buggeln: Artistic Director, Producer” (listen!) – Interview with Sam Buggeln about Storm Country

8/24/16 – ITHACA TIMES – “Silence and the Stars: A Classic Tale with Roots in Ithaca – article about Tess of the Storm Country outdoor screening with the Wharton Studio Museum, and The Cherry’s preview of Storm Country

8/16/16 – ITHACA VOICE – “The Cherry Arts Brings Season of English Language- and World Premier Plays to Ithaca” – Press Release

8/1/16 – ITHACA VOICE – “The Cherry Arts Aims to bring Innovative Art and Theatre to Ithaca’s New Waterfront” – Profile of The Cherry, preview of the Artspace and 2016-17 season

6/1/16 – ITHACA TIMES – “Theatre at the Festival” – Preview of White Rabbit Red Rabbit at Ithaca Festival

4/29/16 – CULTURE BOT – “Do You Wish To Amaze Your Wife This Night?” – Review of SPAM

4/26/16 – NEW YORK THEATRE REVIEW – “Eric Marlin on Cherry Arts’ SPAM at JACK”– Review of SPAM

4/24/16 – CULTURE CATCH – “You’ve Got Spam!”– Review of SPAM

4/20/16 – THE VILLAGE VOICE – “SPAM Makes It Past Our Filter”– Review of SPAM