In his compact comedy The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov captures the surface of society, the polite speech of casual pontifications and daily complaints. What's beneath is a desire to succeed socially; to confront mortality; to be pitied for one's troubles or saved from them entirely; to cope with the horror of change. In Middlebury Acting Company's production, director Melissa Lourie uses a spare set to let us see Chekhov's surface while setting the actors to work deep below, revealing the play's funny and beautiful truths. Chekhov can be hard to perform since the dialogue is rarely about what's going on inside the characters. The audience has to interpret their thoughts and then decide if they're worth caring about. Truth is, it can be easy to dismiss them, but Lourie's strategy is to win us over with warmth. Fourteen characters in lush costumes portray the economic breadth of society in 1903. The formerly wealthy Lyubov Andreyevna's circumstances are dire. She can't pay the mortgage on the estate that's been in her family for generations, having failed to marry a nobleman, been bilked of much of her money and squandered nearly all the rest. She returns from Paris to her childhood home and its beautiful cherry orchard a few months before the estate is due to be auctioned if she can't resolve the debt. A modern American might see this as a problem to solve, but Chekhov captures the terror of change that incapacitated so many Russian aristocrats faced with the loss of their land and power. For the duration of the play, Lyubov tries to listen to something other than the truth. It isn't that hard — her family and servants will talk at length about anything else, sticking to life's daily irritations with grand but meaningless observations. Chekhov's comic subject is the willingness to hide trouble behind a veil of words. The characters are servants, a merchant, a student and newly poor grandees. All are keenly conscious of the hierarchy that governs them, but they nevertheless feel free to tease, confront and judge each other. They're skilled at disregarding others' clever or caustic opinions, dismissing advice while dispensing their own thoughts to equally deaf ears. What they want leaks through, though. They're seeking love, respect or a way of holding back time. Lourie turns the governess into a narrator for a comic kick. Direct address felt like a…