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'Three Sisters' tests life, class, patience
Remember Groundhog Day? The infuriating repetition of events, the protagonist's frustration, the maddening sense of going nowhere? Well, plunk Bill Murray down in the midst of a wealthy family living in pre-Revolution Russia, add another hour to the story, and you've got Three Sisters. A classic drama by Anton Chekhov staged by the Yale School of Drama, the play combines endless repetition of action and dialogue with fatuous characters to tell the story of a group of people disappointed by life yet too accustomed to privilege to change their circumstances. Its relentlessly cyclical structure forces the audience to share the stagnation of the characters' lives. Although Three Sisters effectively places its viewers in a figurative straightjacket, it's a play that takes far too long to show far too little. The goal of theater is generally not to make the audience feel that if they remaines seated any longer, they'll lose their minds.
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The plot of Three Sisters is simple. The action revolves around Olga (Annie Field Worden, DRA '02), Masha (Jeanine Seralles, DRA '02), and Irina (Lucia Brawley, DRA '02), three sisters in the wealthy Prozorov family. Andrey Prozorov (Peter Macon, DRA '03), a promising young violinist and aspiring scientist, marries Natasha (Nancy Kim, DRA '02), a common girl. Love triangles spring up around two of the sisters: married Masha falls for military man Vershinin (Derek Lucci, DRA '03), and single Irina is courted simultaneously by the geeky Baron Tuzenbach (Frank Liotti, DRA '02) and the eccentric Solyony (Jacob Blumer, DRA '03). As the play progresses, the family endures the shrewish Natasha, who transforms into an insufferably self-important matriarch. A devastating fire then strikes the town, and all of the characters confront their insignificant and unfulfilling lives.
In the absence of major plot twists, Three Sisters relies heavily on the strength of its actors. Unfortunately, many of them can't pull their dramatic weight. Liotti's Tuzenbach seems better suited to loser-guy-in-teen-flick than to courting aristocrat. Lucci's Vershinin delivers his lines mechanically, as if he doesn't care whether or not he ever gets the girl. And Kim's Natasha is the human embodiment of nails on a chalkboard: a caricatured, flat rendition of a poor girl made good and corrupted by sudden wealth.
Despite the pre-pondrance of mediocre acting in the production, a couple of the actors—most notably Serralles—rise above the rest of the cast. Her subtle and well-timed gestures, expressions, and glan-ces bring Masha to life vividly. A dead ringer for Sex and the City's Cynthia Nixon, Serr-alles has a stage presence that emerges gradually. When she first appears, she doesn't display riveting beauty or charisma, but her movements and quiet self-possession soon steal the show.
She wordlessly shows subtle shifts in Masha's thoughts and moods, as in the scene where Vershinin finally declares his love. As he falls to his knees and clutches her skirt to his breast, the conflicted Masha backs away from her suitor with startled wide eyes, slapping ineffectually at her skirt while weakly protesting. In a sudden and perfectly timed reversal, she gives in to her true desires and tackles the soldier on the living-room carpet.
The script of Three Sisters is almost laughably Russian, replete with repetition and thinly veiled philosophizing. The characters—all of them wealthy and indolent—continuously celebrate the value and nobility of work and view labor as the path to happiness. Irina complains about being forced to sleep in until noon every day, lying around in bed for a couple more hours, and then getting up to do nothing. Each character is condemned to repeat the same phrases and lament the same maladies again and again; Chekhov encodes in the dialogue an inescapable sense of cyclical motion. Olga talks continuously of aging and her aching head, Vershinin returns ceaselessly to his vision of a future filled with the happiness that eludes him in the present, Masha repeatedly utters a nursery rhyme about an educated cat walking around and around a tree, and Chebutykin (Andrew Guilarté, DRA '02), the patriarch of the family, frequently intones, "What difference does it make?" If the repetition were eliminated—which would, of course, defeat the point of Chekhov's social critique—the play would probably weigh in at a mere 45 minutes.
It's the nonverbal scenes that provide several of the most powerful moments in the play. On a darkened, candlelit stage, the Prozorov's maid (Christie B. Evangelisto, DRA '03) sings Natasha's child to sleep with a haunting Russian lullaby. After Vershinin has left town with the rest of the family's military friends, Masha falls to the ground with a piercing wail; the pathos and frustration of the entire production is captured by her guttural shriek. Soon after, the play ends as Masha begins climbing one of the many birch trees on the set, chin lifted and eyes turned skyward as she physically attempts to rise above her miserable life.
Essentially a play about the isolation, boredom, and miscommunication of life, Three Sisters speaks to the humor and futility of the human condition. The script carefully balances misery with nonsense, preventing the dramatic action from becoming bogged down in pathos. This staging, however, falls into a trap independent of Chekhov's script: it becomes mired in itself. Like the characters, the actors seem unable to move forward and finish things up. The production's flaws introduce a new—and unpleasant—layer of absurdity into an already ridiculous fictional world.
All materials © 2001 The Yale Herald, Inc., and its staff.
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