A Flighty Trio

WHEN ANDREI SERBAN directed The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull at the New York Shakespeare Festival in the 1970s, he seemed content to rely on traditional interpretations of the Chekhov texts. With Three Sisters he has broken away, and it's not entirely a good thing.

Usually directors perceive the play as a tale of claustropohobia, of slow stifling, of atrophy. The three sisters, Masha, Olga, and Irina want to join the whirl and bustle of life in Moscow, but instead they remain in their small town, their hopes and expectations gradually shrinking to fit the confines of their humdrum existence. Directors typically use elaborate, crowded Victorian set designs to suggest the cramped nature of life in the Prozorov household.

Not Serban. His three sisters are more likely to fly away than to crumple. They are so unfulfilled, so dissatisfied, that they lack an anchor in daily events. Their lives are not stifling, but rather so empty that the sisters seem as small and lost as vagrants in an abandoned warehouse.

The traditional theme has the sisters being expelled from their family home by their sister-in-law, Natasha (Karen MacDonald). Indeed, the last act of the play occurs outside the house, in the garden. But Serban's three sisters are floating away even before their brother's wife enters the picture. They don't need to be driven out: They are vaporizing on their own.

More than anything else, the set design by Beni Montresor supplies the production with its anti-gravitational quality. More precisely, the near-total absence of set accomplishes this purpose. A mirrored floor and a red velvet curtain constitute the sole permanent scenery, and both seem oddly out of place. Chairs and a packing crate and blankets on the floor (to suggest beds) appear briefly, as do autumn leaves whose color is much too bright for the mood of the last act.

More appealing symbolism surfaces in the series of visual images which are a Serban trademark and which are enhanced in this production by Montresor's ghostly, haunting light design. Andrei (Thomas Derrah), the three sisters' only brother, and his fiancee, the inhospitable Natasha, kiss in the foreground while everyone else in the cast trots offstage in a long line, their faces illuminated and their bodies dark against the back wall.

In another such scene, Masha (Cheryl Giannini) recites her lines blankly to the tuneless hum of a spinning top. A third vignette shows Natasha sitting among a clutter of her child's toys: Building blocks, a tiny chair, a wooden dog on a string are silhouetted brokenly against the floor.

TOO OFTEN, the images degenerate into ponderous tokens of dejection and resignation. The three sisters are repeatedly grouped in an artificial constellation reminiscent of a portrait photographer's studio. In general, the blocking is overly contrived, too good to be true. Everyone moves mechanically, absolutely without spontaneity, and in dialogue they face front in an exaggerated manner, manifestly not corresponding with each other. The closing scene, in which the sisters voice their optimism about the fate of future generations while cuddling behind a baby carriage, is terribly irritating.

Happily, the occasionally indelicate symbolism cannot ruin Jean-Claude van Itallie's sensitive, arresting new translation. He has dispensed with the halting speech patterns common to translations of Russian works, and has given the characters modern idiosyncrasies and sympathies. Masha's idiotic husband, Kulygin (Richard Grusin), says bumblingly to anyone who says a kind word about his wife. "Yes, of course, you're absolutely right. I love her very much, Masha. She's very nice." Masha calls her hated sister-in-law a "petit bourgeois bitch."

The ART company, as usual, acquits itself competently. No single actor steals the show or dazzles with thespian brilliance, but all-perform convincingly. Karen MacDonald as Natasha is appropriately flamboyant and flouncing. Cheryl Giannini manages very well the tenuous connection between Masha's existential misery and her womanly love for Lieutenant Coloral Vershinin (Alvin Epstein).

Cherry Jones as Irina delivers with sensitivity a difficult monologue about the pointlessness of life in general and of work in particular. And Thomas Derrah's Andrei is a compellingly unhappy cuckold and failure. It is hard to understand, though, why the servants have been directed to speak in distorted voices like the Elephant Man.

Three Sisters does not capture an audience's attention automatically; it is talky, slow-paced, and subtle. But it is also a deeply moving, relevant work, with sparks of surprising humor and even a touch of irony. It is to the credit of Serban and the ART that this genuinely gripping production has been mounted. Sadly, it is easy to envision an even more arresting version, in which Serban's odd conception of the sisters' plight did not overwhelm the gentle, quirky, quicksilver loveliness of the play. Even when bolstered by the elegant proficiency of a director like Serban, innovation is not necessarily improvement.