Chekhov’s Bleak Russian Family Drama Receives an Absurdist Makeover

THREE SISTERS

LOCATION: American Repertory Theatre

DATES: Nov. 26-Jan. 1

DIRECTOR: Krystian Lupa

ASST. DIRECTOR: Marcin Wierzchowski



“Andrei lost two hundred last night. The whole town is talking about it.”

“My wife tried to kill herself again last night.”

This exchange, coming late in the first half of director Krystian Lupa’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play “Three Sisters,” exemplifies the tone of the work. The play itself is unremittingly bleak, and Lupa’s direction only amplifies the work’s sense of desperation—which both overtly and subtly pervades each scene—as well as the disconnectedness between characters, as each is too absorbed in their personal misery to worry about others’.

Nothing much actually happens in the play. The title characters (as well as their brother, Andrei) make up a family who once lived in Moscow and still dream of returning, but they are too stuck in their unhappy lives in small-town Russia to dare to make such a drastic shift as a move to the city.

Moscow becomes a symbol of everything their lives are not, holding the potential for the radical changes of excitement and prosperity. Apart from pining for the remote possibility of a move to Moscow, the sisters spend their time engaging in various romantic entanglements, reluctantly working, and playing hostess to the soldiers garrisoned in the town.

This staging of “Three Sisters” often places the action in vague and undefined spaces. Although the events theoretically take place at the turn of the century, the set is defined by extremely modern elements. The most obvious of these is the line of red lights that frames the entire stage, including much of the top, as if to trap the characters within the confines of the set. Corrugated, graffitied iron extends beyond the lights.

Within the lit frame, however, the décor is not incompatible with the early 1900s. The red lights are not the only delineating separating feature of the set, which was also designed by Lupa. A slightly reflective screen divides the living room foreground from the dining room background, allowing the juxtaposition of divergent actions in the two rooms, so the audience’s attention can easily shift back and forth between the two.

The precise physical and mental spaces in which the play takes place are made more unclear by a staging that is self-consciously stylized. The actors overemphasize emotions and often dramatically shift moods with little or no cause. The middle sister Masha (Molly Ward) especially exaggerates her small joys and sorrows. Such stylized acting, along with the dramatic lighting that illuminates much of the play, creates a sense of fantastic strangeness that contrasts with the traditional perception of Chekhov as a realist.

Although the choice to stylize the text in this way is interesting, the embellishments can become so far-fetched that the work becomes inaccessible. At these times, Lupa seems more interested in seeing how far he can stretch the work in absurdist directions than in carefully coaxing sympathy for the characters, or at least an understanding of their desperation. Thus, while technically fascinating, Lupa’s “Three Sisters,” unfortunately, tends to be bogged down by its own cleverness.

—Staff writer Elisabeth J. Bloomberg can be reached at bloomber@fas.harvard.edu.