Confronting Loss in ‘Cherry Orchard’ : Stage: Chekhov’s enduring play hits home for actress Lynn Redgrave, director Tom Moore and the Playhouse itself.

The proof of the poetry in Anton Chekhov’s plays is their durability. Like a divining rod, they continue to plunge into the emotional life of everyone who touches them, opening up fresh wells of feeling every time.

For director Tom Moore, Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” opening Sunday at the La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre, is more than a story of a great estate that must be sold if a certain sum of money isn’t raised by August. He stresses the universal story of individual loss.

“The range of the play is so great,” Moore said. “It encompasses your entire life because it is continually fresh. Whenever you do a production of it, it has to do with your life.”

Moore looks into the script and sees his own memories: his parents’ separation when he was 8 years old and later their deaths--first his mother’s, then his father’s.

But, for Lynn Redgrave who stars as Mme. Ranevsky, the stylish and charismatic owner of the orchard who must now set her wits to saving it, the play makes her think of the loss of her father, Sir Michael Redgrave, who received acclaim for his portrayal of Vanya in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”

And for theatergoers who have been watching the financial struggles of the La Jolla Playhouse over the past year, they see the perfect tale to start a season that almost didn’t happen because of money troubles. Not only does the production, like the script, begin in May when the cherry orchard is in bloom, but, just as Mme. Ranevsky is desperately trying to raise money, the Playhouse itself, in bloom with this play, is still trying to meet its $1-million fund-raising goal by June 30.

If the play is about the Playhouse at its most stressed and stretched, it is also about what the Playhouse does best: giving top artists a chance to work on the projects of their dreams with the artists of their choice.

“The Cherry Orchard” was a dream project for Moore and Redgrave, who have wanted both to work together and to work at the Playhouse for years.

Their acquaintance dates back to “Fridays,” an ill-fated television takeoff on Saturday Night Live that Moore directed and Redgrave once guest-starred on in the early 1980s. Her most memorable skit was “The Eleven Faces of Muriel,” in which she played a woman with multiple personalities, including Ethel Merman and Connie Chung.

“Nobody got my Connie Chung,” she said ruefully on the set of “The Cherry Orchard.”

For Moore, who directed the long-running hit musical “Grease” and has been nominated twice for Tonys (for the Pulitzer Prize-winning “ ‘night, Mother” and “Over Here”), Redgrave’s performance was his one good memory from a TV show he would prefer to forget.

“She’s an actress of great depth and range,” said Moore. “She’s a well-known personality who is also capable of hard work, which doesn’t necessarily happen together. She has a lot of life on stage, and she wants to tackle the hard roles. And this is one of them.”

He also values her sense of humor.

“There’s a lot of melancholy and ennui in Chekhov, but there is also a lot of fun. You suffer, but when you can laugh, you do.”

For Redgrave, a frequent face on television (“House Calls” and “Chicken Soup”) who makes it a point to perform on stage at least once a year, the opportunity to work with Moore was an offer she couldn’t resist.

“I particularly liked ‘ ‘night, Mother.’ And there really aren’t many theater directors who go out and direct theater anymore.”

That, in fact, could have been said of Moore, for whom “The Cherry Orchard” will be a return to the stage after four years of directing television shows such as “thirtysomething,” “L.A. Law,” “The Wonder Years” and a variety of television movies.

Then, too, the Playhouse was a powerful calling card for both stars.

“I saw ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with Amanda Plummer and John Vickery at the Playhouse in its first year, and I really liked it,” said Redgrave. “So I called up Des McAnuff,” he said of the artistic director of the theater, “and said, ‘Can I do a Shakespeare with you?’ ”

Their schedules didn’t coincide until 1985, and it wasn’t a Shakespeare piece. Redgrave was set to do Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” in La Jolla, but her Broadway run of “Aren’t We All?” with Rex Harrison and Claudette Colbert was extended, and she had to cancel. She jumped at the opportunity to do “The Cherry Orchard,” which will be her first Chekhov play.

“I’m nervous,” she said with a smile. “Nerves don’t get any better with experience. I woke up several times during the night (before the first preview Tuesday).”

But the play has also been restorative for her. Mme. Ranevsky may forfeit her past in the play, but Redgrave, who comes from a long line of actors, reclaims hers every time she performs on stage.

Redgrave deeply misses her father, who died in 1985. And this play brings her closer to him.

“I have a great sense of family along with my sister and brother, three acting nieces and a student-acting daughter. We all have the sense of carrying on a family tradition. I very strongly conjure up before a performance a memory of the generations of actors in my family and find strength in that.”

Moore was motivated to return to the theater with this play because, “I missed working on a piece of literature that one is incredibly passionate about.”

Sometimes that passion comes at a price. It was his extreme disappointment over his first Broadway flop, “Frankenstein,” that allowed him to pour frustration, pain and a feeling of vulnerability into Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters” at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, which was one of his great successes.

The Cherry Orchard “is much more synthesized,” Moore said. “By the time he wrote this, he was quite ill. He died six months later. He was writing about his own death.”

It is that sense that Moore is trying to capture.

“You can’t do Chekhov until you’ve experienced loss and frustration. Our best production of Chekhov would be if we all got together just before we died.”