Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (review)

performance notes THREE SISTERS Anton Chekhov New Version by Jean-Claude van Itallie Directed by Andrei Serban American Repertory Theatre (Boston) Arthur Holmberg When the lights go up on Andrei Serban's new production of ThreeSisters, they reveal a stage full of darkness. As one's eyes readjust to the dimness, three monolithic silhouettes take shape and, ghostlike, float across the stage bearing flowers for the dead. An eerie, disembodied voiceover fills the theatre with bits and pieces of memory skimming the surface of consciousness . Then, the three sisters begin to talk, slightly out of sync with their own recorded voices. This indelible stage picture sets the mood for Serban's ruthless probing of the play's central tensions between past and present, hope and despair, life and death. Throughout the production darkness threatens to close in. But while the light lasts, it is pure glow, brilliant and warm. Serban has stripped away the usual bourgeois interior. Only the beautifully crafted costumes and a few crucial stage props-a samovar here, a gramophone there-anchor us to a specific time and place. By paring down, the director uncovers the archetypal encoded in the realistic. Instead of a claustrophobic drawing room, Beni Montresor has designed a playing space delineated by two massive red velvet curtains in the back and banks of footlights on either side of a mirrored floor. And beyond the lights, infinite, palpable black. The Prozorov house becomes a small theatrum mundi onto which the familiar poor players strut and fret their hour. But what exuberant fretting! Using the fluid rhythms of silent films, Serban has so accelerated the movement that without betraying the play's elegiac sadness he gives the audience a dense impression of life-even in its petty, stupid details-lived to the hilt. The director doesn't miss a moment for energizing the stage picture. Anfisa (Anne Pitoniak) doesn't walk into the birthday cake, she scuds across the boards. Lost In silent dreams, Masha (Cheryl Giannini) twirls herself to a Chopin mazurka. Vershinin (Alvin Ep71 stein) leaps atop a chair to philosophize, wigwagging his handkerchief like an SOS. Irina (Cherry Jones) spins in circles, hoping to fly away like the birds overhead. Olga (Marianne Owen) rakes leaves with a furious haste in order to avoid Vershinin. Solyony (Tony Shalhoub) falls into a wild Cossack dance to gloss over his social insecurity. Natasha (Karen MacDonald) scatters Vershinin's flowers underfoot while making plans to chop down the Prozorov's fir trees. But Serban does not deploy this manic agitation and strangely dislocated stage business merely to create striking visual images . His characters use gestures the way they use language-as a narcotic . The search for oblivion is summed up by Chebutykin, the army doctor richly portrayed by Jeremy Geidt as a pixilated, addlepated nihilist. As the three sisters struggle to hold on to their memories, Chebutykin--thanks to a seemingly endless supply of vodka-seeks to forget. Combing his beard and burbling about small pox in China, he shows how easy it is to withdraw from reality into current events, from truth into facts. He protects himself from the world by rattling a newspaper, and Geidt turns this desperate buffoon , who long ago discovered that he and all other members of his species were de trop in the universe, into a prophet of the absurd. Before Beckett, Chekhov had discovered that farce and tragedy inhabit the same human kingdom. And Serban, aided immeasurably by the brilliant ensemble playing of the ART actors, unearthed other similarities between Chekhov, the master of realism, and Beckett, the clown of existentialism. By emphasizing the ran72 dom, episodic flow of events, this production explodes the mirage of a wellmade play. The characters spend their lives talking and waiting and waiting and talking, and, in the meantime, time passes, bringing not fulfillment but despair. Serban accentuates this despair by letting the various characters drift off into private, solipsistic reveries. Dialogue becomes monologue. No one listens to anyone else. When Andre tries to confess to his sisters in Act III and seek their forgiveness, Masha runs off to meet her lover and Olga and Irina doze off. When Masha tries to explain...