Three Sisters

So…how do you direct one of Chekhov’s great, complicated, tragic, comic plays with everyone in stage acting as though they’re in a different production and with a translation that is loudly anachronistic and still have it work? I may have sat through all three plus hours of Austin Pendleton’s production Three Sisters last week, but I still have no damned idea.

Being a very long, very Russian play, Three Sisters, as expected, features melancholy characters nattering on about peasants, snow, and sadness. The titular sisters all long to return to their family home in Moscow, but they’re stuck (to varying degrees and for varying reasons) in a tiny town populated mostly my military troops. The sisters are overeducated and well off enough that they don’t really need to do much of anything. Commence: ennui.

So obviously Chekhov was a fucking genius; his plays are among the richest, most humane, beautiful, thrilling, and sad that have ever been written. There’s also a delicacy there that requires a good production. The whole enterprise of a Chekhov play can go down like the Hindenburg if the performances aren’t properly shaded and the emotional rhythms well excavated. They can be the most exciting plays to watch, or they can be an exercise in tedium. This one, at the Classic Stage Company, was happily the former. But seriously, I don’t understand how it worked.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Masha, the most miserable sister, as a sort of manic bipolar. For much of the time, I couldn’t figure out if her emotional outbursts were laughter or crying until eventually I realized it didn’t much matter considering how close together the two were for her. Juliet Rylance played Irina, the youngest and ostensibly happiest sister with a look on her face that always made it appear she might start crying at any moment. Marin Ireland played the sister-in-law of the title characters as a shrieking harpy straight out of Married with Children. No one altered their accents. Emotional levels were wildly varied. And yet, in this crazy group of individual performances, there seemed to be some unholy harmony that was ultimately deeply affecting. It just…worked.

That’s not to say the play was without its jarring moments. Cast the slender Josh Hamilton as a character who apparently keeps gaining weight, and it starts to get awkward. Peter Sarsgaard was supposed to be in his mid-40s, and while he might not be far from that in real life, he hardly looks like the grizzled military man he’s playing. Meanwhile, the sisters appear to each be fifteen years apart. Visually, very few people looked as the text described them. And given how freely this was translated, I’m surprised they didn’t just alter those mentions. I mean really, when Andrei started being referred to as “Andy,” I just wanted to shout, “Oh, come ON!”

But all told, it was an exquisite evening. Much of the play focuses on the notion that as much as the world might change, the people in it will always have the same problems—people will love who they shouldn’t, want what they can’t have, and misunderstand what moves them to behave as they do. It’s discussions of what life a century beyond would look like feel nearly prophetic, and there is a degree of comfort (and a degree of sadness) in knowing that no matter what happens, it is destiny for people to go through times of happiness and sadness, love and loneliness, war and peace, and all you can do is hope for the best and go along for the ride.