Chekhov's 'Three sisters' Admirably Staged

STRATFORD, CONN.--If took an awfully long time for Russia to make major contributions to world literate and music. But when its time came, in the 1820's and 1830's, Russia exploded into global significance with a dazzling roster of great figures in both fields.

In the realm of letters, Pushkin and Lermontov were giants in poetry. The novel reached lofty heights with Goncharov, Gogol, Turgenev, and others--and a level unsurpassed in any other country or time with Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Some of these wrote for the theatre too, but the chief dramatists were Griboyedov, Ostrovsky, Gorky, and -- above all -- Anton Chekhov.

Although Chekhov is Russia's supreme playwright, he did not devote the bulk of his efforts to the theatre. He was a physician, but spent most of his time turning out a stream of short stories--a field that paid well and paid quickly, important factors for Chekhov, who had a large family to support. In a life restricted to forty four years by the ravages of tuberculosis, he penned short stories totalling, I believe, close to a thousand. At any rate, he is universally considered Russia's greatest short-story teller, and by many the foremost practitioner of the short story in the world.

Compared with this, his theatrical output was rather small. His eminence and influence have come, really, from only four plays--the last four: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. It is not correct, as often claimed, that Chekhov became interested in the theatre only in his last years. In his youth, in fact, he enjoyed quite a reputation as an actor in both professional and non-professional undertakings, which gave him a good deal of practical knowledge of the stage.

Besides a batch of one-act plays, mostly light "vaudevilles," Chekhov wrote a total of nine full-evening, four act plays. Of the first two, penned when he was 18, we know only the titles: The Fatherless, and Laugh It Off If You Can. At 21, he wrote the sprawling but remarkable Platonov, which turned up only long after his death, in the Soviet period. In his late twenties, he turned out Ivanov, a flawed but great and vastly underrated work capable of packing a tremendous wallop in performance; and the tentative, transitional The Wood Demon, which later also provided much of the plot of Uncle Vanya.

In truth, Chekhov did not feel any strong inner drive to write for the theatre. He composed his plays only when he felt they had a good chance of imminent performance; and, furthermore, he wrote his parts for specific players--an idea that finds few advocates today, although it is precisely what Shakespeare had done. None of Chekhov's plays was fully understood and appreciated at its first performance, and he was repeatedly plagued with self-doubts. On occasion he vowed never to bother with the stage again. And he got into heated interpretational conflicts with Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, the two heads of the celebrated Moscow Art Theatre, whose influence still plagues Chekhov's works.

Almost everyone concedes that each of the last four Chekhov plays is a masterpiece, and hands the first prize to The Cherry Orchard. I happen to belong to the small group that views The Three Sisters as the summit of all Russian drama. (On Chekhov's own admission, it was the play that caused him the most trouble to perfect.) And this is the work that the American Shakespeare Festival has chosen to round out the current season, thus departing from the fifth time in its history.

Mature Chekhov is unbelievably difficult to do well in performance. Amateur productions can almost always be counted on to fail; professional productions fail far more often than not. This Three Sisters, as directed by Michael Kahn, must be adjudged a success; only one of the leading roles comes off less than satisfactorily.

In Platonov and Ivanov, for instance, Chekhov dramatized an individual, and one tremendous performance can bring them off. From The sea Gull on, however, Chekhov was portraying a group; a star or two will not suffice. Here Chekhov has done away with the clear spine that drives through the play from one exciting event to another, from one "sock on the jaw" (Chekhov's phrase) to another; he has turned his back on the technique of say, Ibsen and Strindberg. He has, in effect, turned from the solo concerto with orchestra to the more subtle and contrapuntal interplay of chamber music.

In The Three Sisters there is a spine, but it is submerged well below the surface--like almost everything else in the play. The work requires a lot from its audience, which may easily choose to be just as board as some of Chekhov's characters claim to be. People say there is no plot. In a way they are right. Instead, there is a congeries of tiny plotlets, ever so delicately and carefully contrived.

Chekhov once wrote of playwriting "in which people arrive, go away, have dinner, talk about the weather, and play cards. Life must be exactly as it is, and people as they are--not on stilts.... Let everything on the stage be just as complicated, and at the same time just as simple as it is in life." This is a prescription for utter naturalism; and, if followed exactly, it would yield only tedium.

But Chekhov in his late plays fused the "as it is" with "as it should be"; he took a moral position. True, he did adopt a quasi-realistic diction with its illogicalities, its wandering directions, its repetitions; but he was skillful enough to infuse it with a marvelous rhythm and a sort of poetic evocativeness. (This technique strongly affected the plays of our own O'Neill, Odets, and Hellman.) The director and the players--and, indeed, the audience-- must be able to catch unspecified implications, to apprehend not so much what is said as what is consciously or subconsciously thought and not said. In addition, Chekhov has woven a host of verbal and tangible symbols into his texture, which makes the result richer than any mere slice-of-life.

There is a special emphasis on objects in The Three sisters, which rules out the use of stylized settings. In the huge cavernous space of the Festival theatre, one couldn't just construct the usual box of three walls and a ceiling. William Ritman has solved the problem nicely by having us face the living-room (and dining-room beyond) from the diagonal. And he has carefully included objects that tell us much about the characters of the household--little vases of lilacs or lilies-of-the-valley, framed pictures, an old square piano with a tasseled shawl, candle brackets by the main door, a writing desk and accoutrements, a folding screen, antimacassars on the backs and arms of chairs, and so on. Hovering over everything in the back are gray tree branches suggestive of tentacles that keep the inhabitants rooted to their provincial garrison town although they long to go to Moscow and its supposedly greener grass. (But Chekhov himself is careful again and again to poke holes in the characters' absurd vision of Moscow as an alleged paradise. Furthermore, I wish the cast would agree on a pronunciation of the city's second syllable.)

Although Chekhov is depicting a group of people, almost everyone of them is decidedly lonely, and frustrated in one way or another. And they are all ordinary, unexceptional people, essentially failures. Yet they are not carbon copies of each other--except in bad productions. Director Kahn and his players have managed to assure that every single one of these average people is unique, is an individual, is a three-dimensional character, with a past, a present, and--this is important--a future. Chekhov envisions a happier future for later, generations, and underlines the necessity of hard work and hope. The play has a moderately upbeat ending -- though many don't seem to realize it. The Three Sisters is not a tragedy (a label Chekhov never used: it, like Ivanov, is a "drama"; The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard are "comedy"; Uncle Vanya is called "scenes from country life"). The Three Sisters is two parts pathos and one part comedy. Much in the play is funny, much is witty--and Kahn has not let this get obscured.

The play has fourteen speaking parts. Of these only the two lieutenants Fedotik and Rode are minor (Kahn, in a felicitous touch, has given Fedotik a bit of extra business with his camera at the end of the first act, when Natasha and Andrey kiss). This means that there are twelve vitally important roles, with the subtlest web of interactions.

Of the titular sisters, Olga, in her late twenties, is the eldest, and she opens and closes the play. Marian Seldes has beautifully caught the quiet suffering of this reluctant schoolteacher, subject to headaches, who is finally forced into still more responsibility as a headmistress. She has the true manner--of a proper spinster schoolmarm, and her sense of duty is reflected in her ramrod-straight carriage.

Marcia Tucci brings a glowing radiance to Irina, the youngest, who is loved by two men she cannot love and who ardently believes in the restorative power of hard work. One can see her vision of the future in her very eyes.

Kate Reid is the show's weak link as the middle sister Masha (the role originally played by Chekhov's own wife), bored with her marriage to a pedant and fated to be separated from the one man she comes to love. For one thing--and it may be ungallant to say so--Miss Reid can no longer pass for a young woman in her midtwenties. Masha is also the most complicated of the three sisters. Miss Reid has no particular trouble conveying the blunt, even coarse speech of Masha, but she has not sufficiently plumbed the poetic sensitivity that lies beneath. It is not a bad performance; it just leaves a great deal yet to be explored. The problem of Masha's and Vershinin's drum-roll exchanges ("Tram-tam-tam ... tra-ra-ra"), the shortest mutual love scene ever written for the stage, has been effectively solved by substituting complementary phrases from the aria "All men should once with love grow tender" in Act II of Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin.

Michael McGuire, with handlebar moustache, goatee, and a chest full of medals, cuts a handsome and dashing figure as the garrulous, fortyish battery commander Vershinin, who saddled with an impossible wife, obtains Masha's love in one of the play's several amorous triangles. He is just fine as he repeats his desire for a glass of tea, and finally gives up, saying, "Well, if we can't have any tea, lets philosophize."

Joseph Maher is acceptable as Masha's doting husband Kulygin, a pathetic and essentially brainless schoolteacher who likes to go around spouting worn-out Latin slogans. We must forgive him, for he knows not what he does to Masha.

As the young baron Tusenbach, the lieutenant who wins Irina's hand only to be shot in a duel, Brain Bedford performs with great skill--to the extent to actually playing on the piano the middle section of Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu. His glasses, moustache, and long hair parted squarely in the center help make him properly homely. There is an extraordinary amount of traffic in this play--entrances and exists, greeting and farewells. One of the most moving farewells in all drama is the parting of Irina and Tusenbach in Act IV--a fine example of Chekhov's oblique method, for the poignance derives not from what they say but from what they don't say. Miss Tucci and Bedford handle this scene beautifully --in both inflection and timing; and Bedford is most touching in his exit speech about the life-sharing quality of a dead tree swaying in the wind. What incredible mastery Checkhov shows here!

Irina's other suitor is the captain, Solyony, who kills Tusenbach in the duel. He is a strange man, and throughout the play keeps putting scent on his hands to get rid of their smell of death--like some sort of male Lady Macbeth. Right from the first act, Charles Cioffi's portrayal is a remarkable piece of acting. Solyony speaks scarcely a half dozen times in all of Act I, and spends most of the time sitting silently on a chair in the corner. Nevertheless, Cioffi tells us a great deal about this morose and mysterious character. We notice a tiny facial tic, and a nervous fidgeting of the thumbs. Sometimes he talks to himself. At other times we perceive that the conversation is making no impact on him at all: his mind has drifted elsewhere, and his eyes have gone dull.

Incidentally, the fatal duel does not occur on stage. By his own admission, Chekhov had a hard time doing without the conventional pistol shot, which was an important feature of every one of his plays through The Three Sisters. But here, for the first time, the pistol shot takes place way off in the distance. And only in his final play, The Cherry Orchard, is there no pistol--instead we hear the forlorn sound of a far-off axe chopping a tree as the curtain falls.

Len Cariou is first-rate as the sisters' brother Andrey, who loses control of the household to his adulterous wife. He gives up his dream of becoming a famous university professor, and contents himself with being secretary to his wife's lover on the local county agriculture committee--a post so petty that he has to bolster his pride by berating a subordinate for not addressing him a "Your Honor," and--like Abe Fortas--seek solace in going off by himself to play the violin. Cariou makes him genuine, well-meaning, and pathetic; and I'd swear he really puts on weight during the three and a half years covered by the play.

Roberta Maxwell misses little in her portrayal of Andrey's fiancee and, later, cuckolding wife Natasha, a vile and vulgar creature who ends up holding all the reins, and who insists on pretentiously flaunting her inadequate knowledge of French. Few scenes in all drama are as chillingly cruel as the one in which Natasha upbrades the loyal octogenarian nanny Anfisa and proceeds to advocate kicking her out because the old woman can't work enough, both does not convey sufficient age. (It occurs to me that director Kahn might have improved his production by switching the roles of Misses Maxwell and Reid; the former looks young enough of an equally distasteful albeit quite different Natasha.)

Morris Carnovsky gets full mileage out of the aging army doctor Chebutykin, who lives Irina as he had loved her mother. Carnovsky provides a masterly depiction of a gradually deteriorating personality. He has never read a book, and occupies himself with little that is more lofty than his ever-present daily newspaper (in real Russian, too). He must have been a pretty inferior physician at the outset, and in the course of the play he sinks to the belief that absolutely nothing matters anymore. So far gone is Carnovsky's doctor that, after washing and drying his hand in a basin, he proceeds immediately to wash them all over again. At the end Carnovsky shows us the mere shell of a man with not a shred of humanity left inside.

The deaf old porter Ferapont is in the capable hands of James Greene, who is obliged to wear shabby or worn-out clothing and whose figures stick through holes in his black mittens. He carries out his menial chores without complaint. Michael Parish and Tom Klunis do yeoman service in small straightforward roles of lieutenants Fedotik and Rode.

Jane Greenwood's costumes and Thomas Skelton's lighting are always fitting. There are at least a dozen widely known translations of The Three Sisters, but none of them was selected for this production. Kahn is using a version by Moura Budberg, of whom I know nothing at all. Her translation is viable enough, though there are a few things she has not got quite right, and at times some dictional touches that seem a bit too modern for a late-nineteenth-century milieu.

In recent years The Three Sisters is the Chekhov play that has been most frequently staged around the country. I suspect it will be quite some time before we have another production that captures as well as this one so much of the profundity and irony that Checkhov put into his richest study of the character and purpose of life