Saul Kim’s Glass House Set Anchors Cherry Orchard at Park Avenue Armory

Saul Kim’s set for Simon Stone’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 1904 play “The Cherry Orchard” premiered at Park Avenue Armory in New York on September 16 — and it was completed before Stone finished writing the script.

That unusual sequence shaped the production. The finished design generated new anecdotes for the play, placing the set and the performance in what Kim describes as an even more dynamic dialogue.

The adaptation, performed in Korean, uses Stone’s radically rewritten script. It transposes largely the same sequence of events from Russia to just outside modern Seoul. The changes, both large and small, have drawn mixed reviews.

Sightlines drove key formal decisions. Kim had to negotiate visibility for both the audience and the actors. He cut the front facade into a concave form so that the audience could see from all angles. Installing the facade’s large glass panels posed a difficult but necessary challenge: additional window frames would have obstructed the actors’ faces.

Helen Shaw, reviewing the production in The New York Times, described Kim’s set as a Modernist glass house — a graceful white triangle that is a “much remarked-on reminder of the family’s stature.”

“The house’s stepped-ziggurat-like shape looks like a toy mountain, and characters sometimes climb to its summit to survey their dwindling domain,” she continues.

Kim frames the project in architectural terms. “The set reinterprets the house as both an architectural object and a symbol of generational wealth, memory, and its eventual dissolution,” he said.

“Rather than reproducing a specific domestic interior, the design isolates and rearranges familiar architectural elements: the ground rises into a roof, the roof becomes a stair, and a dormer unexpectedly cuts through the circulation,” Kim told AN. “These components remain recognizable, but their conventional relationships are deliberately displaced.”

Acoustics carried equal weight. Stone, the writer-director, insisted on precise sound behavior: voices needed to sound different inside and outside the set to create a more authentic experience.

Kim placed the house within a white, almost contextless environment. “The house is placed within a white, almost contextless environment, removing a fixed sense of time and location and allowing the architecture to operate more abstractly,” he said. “As the performance unfolds, the set becomes less a backdrop than an active spatial structure through which the tensions between inheritance, change, and instability are made visible.”

The set extends the logic of Kim’s broader practice. Based in Seoul, Kim works as an architectural designer, educator, and author of the design study series Architecture Anomaly. The series comprises 164 architectural objects, each executed with correct dimension and proportion but never worked on for more than an hour. Walls become floors or stairs; grounds become roofs, or suddenly suspend or sink; forms slump, twist, and interlock.

“When we see these recognizable parts, they trigger the preconceived notion of how they normally look like and how they’re normally used and what they’re normally used for,” Kim writes of the series. “The manipulation and the misappropriation of these elements create something that is almost surrealistic and anomalous, that defies the convention of architecture, whether it is spatial or formal.”

“The Cherry Orchard” runs at Wade Thompson Drill Hall through Saturday, September 26.