by Anton Chekhov
Directed by Martha Henry
At the Tom Patterson Theatre
May 9-October 3, 2009

   Directors and actors have long argued about the best way to play Chekhov. Should he be presented as if dark, grim, and severe? Or should he be interpreted for comedy? Is he overwhelmingly a dramatist of melancholy and elegy, or is he really a visionary with an ironic twist? It should be no surprise that anyone who sees Chekhov’s plays as requiring an Either-Or choice is woefully out of key with the great playwright—surely one of the world’s greatest writers of tragicomedy. Martha Henry, fortunately, makes many of her directorial choices for Three Sisters work admirably, though, ultimately, her production fails to reach the heights of powerful realism achieved by other versions I have seen. The reasons for this are several. To begin with, the Tom Patterson is the wrong space for the play. It is long, rectangular and open on three sides, and this prevents any palpable sense of claustrophobia—of a stifling environment so necessary to the defeated spirit of many of the principal characters. It also defeats the designer, John Pennoyer, in providing a physical sense of the rural backwater where the Prozorov sisters are wasting their lives in hopeless dreams of escape and self-fulfillment. As is his custom, Pennoyer does well in the costuming area, offering us mundane habiliments rather than fancy dress, but his attempt at suggesting the woods is laughably inept. The stylized trees look like eerie fossils, but if they were meant to be emblems expressive of death-in-life, they are simply ill-wrought, seeming more like large strips of tripe rather than firs, beeches, and maples. Another reason could be—though I am uncertain in this regard, not having actually read her text—Susan Coyne’s modern translation that has a prosaic suppleness but lacks a sense of poetry.

   Another, larger reason for the limitations in Henry’s production concerns casting, and I shall get to this point after I run through what is so wonderfully correct about her version. The production has a nice flow, for instance, with a palpable sense of constant doing. There is something always going on in the background, in a different area of the stage while the central focus is held somewhere else. This can sometimes be distracting, of course, but it does provide a sense of continuous action. And the physical details are life size, not magnified for sophisticated beauty. It is a site of real people with real chores and duties in a house of wood and icons, under dim lighting. But it is also a site of philosophy and festivity, of laughter and tears. It is not theatrical festivity so much as the natural gaiety of certain moments of life and being. There is a solid sense of an ensemble—as there was in Ms. Henry’s production of Elizabeth Rex many seasons ago, and her best work as director, apart from this production. The servants seem to belong to this particular household, although they, like the others, have to struggle to keep up with life. It is also a household where the most glamorous, most cultured folk are the military—as was the case in Chekhov’s day. And so we have Vershinin, who is as lonely in his current marriage as Masha is in her own. Tom McCamus plays him with an admirable mixture of idealism and wistfulness, and his love scenes with Lucy Peacock’s Masha are full of feeling.

   In fact, real feeling often charges the air in this production, especially from Juan Chioran’s mocking Solyony, the nasty, rude tormentor of Baron Tuzenbach. Chioran relishes the role, showing us a bit of a dandy, half in love with himself as with Irina, forever lavishing care over his hands and pouring mocking scorn on the baron. Sean Arbuckle makes his character an exhausted romantic, a man who loves Irina but more as a spirit, where Chioran’s Solyony loves her like a devouring animal. Peter Hutt’s Kulygin, the boring schoolteacher-husband of Masha, is a marvelous portrait, kind but tiresome, forever grading every character and action as if he were slave to the classroom. And wonderful Kelli Fox is Natasha, the social climber who begins fearfully and becomes increasingly vulgar and authoritarian once she is married to Andrei, the hapless Prozorov brother. Ms Fox is loud and full of energy, bustling her way into illicit sexual liaisons, dominating her husband, cruelly tormenting the servants, brushing off her sisters-in-law, and perversely planning to cut down all the trees. But there are shortcomings elsewhere in the cast. Not in Joyce Campion’s old, faithful Anfisa or Robert King’s Ferapont, but in the Andrei of Gordon S. Miller and the Dr. Chebutykin of James Blendick. Miller lacks the acting experience for Andrei, who is supposed to be a fatigued cipher with unrealistic artistic aspirations, while Blendick often seems to be acting by rote rather than with genuine feeling as the nihilist who may have loved the sisters’ mother.

   Ms. Henry seems to know that Chekhov is about the brutality of life, and that his poetry is really about dreaming and results in a deeper passivity. The three sisters are about memory and nostalgia because they can never forget their idealized father and their earlier privileged mode of existence in Moscow. Stuck in a provincial town that is twenty miles away from the nearest railway station, they have to deal with a quality of life that is full of disappointment and stifled ambition. They cannot return to Moscow; they can only look forward, but looking forward (as the late Stella Adler so brilliantly explained) gives them “a kind of anguish.”

   Taking this perspective to heart, Ms. Henry offers us characters without pretty trimmings. Olga and Irina make natural contrasts with brooding Masha, but they are set off by differences in “inner realism” rather than costumes or physical characteristics. Or at least, Ms. Henry would wish that it were so. Unfortunately, neither Irene Poole (who plays Olga, the eldest, a straitlaced teacher) nor Dalal Badr (who plays sweet, innocent Irena) is up to their tasks. Admittedly, Olga is a maternal figure, without romance or adequate relief, but she was once a popular debutante. However, Ms. Poole makes her too dry and without the force to be representative of a general’s daughter or the poetry to be the one person who loves her sisters as if she and they were all a single person. Ms. Badr is too plain for Irina. She does not dream with her eyes, and only seems to be acting on cue. It is left to Lucy Peacock (whose work of late has turned her into a genuinely major actress) to give us a Masha who is not just a hysteric—as many American actresses interpret her to be. Instead, Ms. Peacock’s Masha is a woman who would like to come to full life again. Either absorbed in a book or daydreaming while whistling to herself, she wears a dark dress that is representative of her giving up on life—at least until McCamus’ Vershin appears. Then watch as her eyes devour him and she moves closer to him, listening attentively to everything he says. This Masha has mercurial shifts of mood: she clenches her teeth when her husband tries to kiss her; she is bitterly cynical about her educated background in the backwater; and she is heartbreaking in her parting from Vershinin, kissing him with desperate hunger, and fighting like a wild animal when pulled away by Olga, only to crumble in bitter futility. Ms. Peacock is so wrenchingly authentic that she is altogether moving in her vulnerability. She is the only sister who has a mystery to her being, and she is the only actress of the three women who brings her character vividly and thrillingly to life, showing how struggle—no matter the defeat in the end—can be heroic. Unfortunately, the play requires three sisters, not just one.

photos: David Hou

pic 1: (L-R): Dalal Badr (Irena), Irene Poole (Olga), Lucy Peacock (Masha)

pic 2: Juan Chioran as Solyony

pic 3: Lucy Peacock (Masha), Irene Poole (Olga)



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