WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. – Tasked with the impossible, Michael Greif has achieved the improbable: He has made “The Cherry Orchard” work, mostly, with only three weeks of rehearsal. The people at the Williamstown Theatre Festival didn’t mean to set Mr. Greif up for a fall, as in one of those sadistic festivals where you write, rehearse, and perform a play in 24 hours. Three weeks is about all you get when you put on any show at Williamstown. Sometimes, that’s enough; but sometimes, you do Chekhov.

Mr. Greif’s production is sensitive to the playwright’s strange beauty. He skips strict realism for suggestive, effervescent scenes. Instead of heavy furniture and samovars, we get curtains, trees in bloom, and children

skipping through the transitions. The approach holds up. Though Chekhov gets lumped with Ibsen and Strindberg as turn-of-the-century champions of realism, his work stands apart.

“The Cherry Orchard” is a desperately sad play, about two siblings who let their family estate slip away, the parvenu merchant who buys it, and the passing of a way of life. Yet Chekhov called it a comedy, and somehow, the sadder it gets, the more you laugh. Mr. Greif gets at some of this bittersweet quality. When the family mistakenly leaves their poor old servant Firs (Frank Raiter) behind at the end, you want to laugh and cry at once.

This is not a style of playwriting, this is philosophy: Chekhov used the stage to present a certain view of life, singular and encompassing. In some ways, he has more in common with Beckett than with his contemporaries. Even when a director makes the right moves, and has an exempla ry cast, as Mr. Greif does, it’s not the sort of thing you can make fully satisfying on short notice. It’s like giving Brian Wilson a weekend in the studio and telling him to have “Pet Sounds” ready for Monday.

The show opens with a man in a chair, nodding off as he reads a book. He awakes with a start as the scenery for Act 1 flies in behind him. It may or may not be Chekhov; it is certainly Lopakhin, the rich man from humble origins who tries to convince the estate owners of their peril.

He is supposed to be an awkward man, ill-mannered, who waves his arms too much. Ritchie Coster takes this as a cue to play Lopakhin with breathtaking eccentricity. He stands with elbows out and up, fingertips arrayed across his vest. He makes lots of quick foot movements, turning in tight circles. The whole effect recalls a matador without a cape, or Curly Howard. Still Mr. Coster manages to convey the bruised pride Lopakhin nurses: He talks like a Menshevik, but seethes like a Bolshevik.

The production develops bite when the feckless siblings arrive. After their triumphs last spring in “Homebody/Kabul,” the excellent duo of Linda Emond and Reed Birney are reunited here as Ranevskaya and Gaev, the sister and brother letting their birthright slip away. Mr. Birney makes Gaev a laughing, middle-aged adolescent, a watered-down sort of man. He’s as frivolous as his sister.

Ms. Emond doesn’t overpower her scenes. Instead of diva histrionics, she opts for a languid coquettishness. Watch as Lopakhin tries to show her why the cherry orchard must be sold. Ms. Emond looks on with the pained, tolerating smile a politician adopts when pretending to take a nutty constituent seriously. The sad truth here is that Lopakhin is talking sense, and Ranevskaya is the fool: an impossible woman.

Chekhov proves vexing because it demands totality: Either there’s a fully realized whole, or a string of sporadically interesting parts. Even with top-drawer actors, a wrong choice or two can glare. Michelle Williams succeeds in making Varya, Ranevskaya’s adopted daughter, fussy and hyperresponsible: She wears black, but unlike Masha in “The Sea Gull,” it’s be cause she’s in mourning for everybody else’s life.

It’s a compelling performance until she really wants it to be compelling: Jilted by Lopakhin, Ms. Williams turns on the water works, doubling over in tears. Ms. Emond and Mr. Birney join in the hysterics before their final exit. These closing scenes would be stronger if they were drier.

Most of the supporting players know their business. Jessica Stone gives the servant Dunyasha a flighty charm, Jonathan Fried is funny and charismatic as the hapless Yepikhodov. Like some of their castmates, they haven’t found the full depth of their characters’ heartbreaks, at least not yet. But they’re talented people. By the time you read this, they may be fine.

As the proud student Trofimov, Chris Messina is already in top form. “I’m a free man,” he declares, with great authority, when refusing Lopakhin’s charity. Lee Wilkof hits the right mix of comic and pathetic as the hanger-on Pischik. All of this sterling work is supported by Allen Moyer’s scenery and Michael Friedman’s music, which are at once immediate and melancholy. If only James Ingalls’s lighting weren’t so gloomy: it’s the last thing Chekhov needs.

“The Cherry Orchard”was Chekhov’s last play, finished just before his death in 1904. As it turns 100, the play marks the festival’s last full production in the Adams Memorial Theatre. Next season, the festival moves to a new theater next door. In case anybody misses the significance of this play about endings and beginnings, the script has been tweaked, so that the fate of the orchard is now decided on August 22 – closing night for this production. By then, Mr. Greif’s production might blossom into a really poignant farewell.