Jan. 31,
1901— When the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) prepared its third production of an Anton Chekhov play, its actors were baffled, complaining that the script was “not
a play, but only a scheme; there are no roles but only hints.” At its premiere
on this date, audience reaction was bifurcated, with 12 curtain-calls after Act
I “but only a half-hearted one after Act IV.”
In the
century and a quarter since, Three Sisters has taken its place in
the world’s theater canon, though directors and actors still sometimes
struggle, as they do with Chekhov’s other plays, with the delicate balance
between rueful comedy and drama.
I
myself have witnessed the divergent results from the Russian
doctor-turned-writer’s “hints.” Though critical reaction was divided at the
time, a 1997 Roundabout Theatre production looks better in retrospect,
with a starry cast featuring Amy Irving, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Lily Taylor as
the titular siblings and, in supporting roles, Billy Crudup, Calista Flockhart,
Paul Giamatti, Jerry Stiller, Eric Stoltz, David Strathairn, and Justin Theroux.
On
the other hand, a smaller-scale 2011 production at the Chautauqua Institution,
as I noted in my review, was fundamentally misconceived, filled with “directorial
encrustations [that] covered and practically suffocated” it.
This
dramedy did not—does not—need such embellishments. Simmering in the
playwright’s consciousness for nearly the prior 20 years before the show
premiered, it limned the decline of three Russian sisters as they dealt with
financial pressures, professional dissatisfaction, and cultural enervation amid
an isolated provincial town.
And,
as University College London Professor Neil Stoker noted in this May 2019 blog post, the play is suffused with Chekhov’s awareness, for half his
life, of the tuberculosis slowly destroying him, heightening a sense that “people
were not just struggling with the imperfections of their own and others’
natures, but with arbitrary, relentless and invisible killers that made any
apparent worldly success futile.”
In
the summer of 1883, while staying at a dacha in south Russia, Chekhov had
become fascinated with the Lintvarev sisters, three women of intellect and
warmth who stimulated his imagination.
Eventually,
he sketched a scenario in which he differentiated their fictional counterparts:
the oldest, Olga, a schoolteacher burdened with financial responsibility;
Masha, the bitter middle sister, who finds refuge from an increasingly loveless
marriage through an affair with a Russian colonel passing through; and Irina,
the youngest, whose innocence is lost under the weight of circumstance.
Moscow,
their childhood home, looms as a symbol of the sisters’ perceived loss of cosmopolitan
enlightenment, entertainment and vivacity.
Chekhov
wrote Masha with the MAT actress Olga Knipper—who became his wife later
that year—in mind. She ended up outliving her husband by half a century, and on
her 90th birthday—now under a Communist regime that had upended the
way of life she and Anton had known so well—she could still recite lines from
the play that had been molded around her.
The
third of Chekhov’s four full-length plays, Three Sisters was, like the
others, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, who used it as a template for his
ideas on naturalistic acting, psychological realism, atmosphere, and indirect
action.
Even
though MAT was well on its way to becoming “The House of Chekhov,” the
playwright and director often clashed on how to stage the play, with Stanislavski
stressing a harsher realism, leading Chekhov at one point to depart
from rehearsals in a huff for Nice, France, convinced as late as three days before the premiere that the show would fail.
What
united the collaborators, despite their differences in tone, was a sense that
their characters and subject matter—ordinary Russians of different classes and
occupations, unsure and paralyzed over how to act in a time of shifting
socioeconomic change—required a changed treatment of plot and atmosphere.
The
large, melodramatic gestures of royalty, for instance, would be replaced by
smaller moments that might precede or follow major events. So, as in Three
Sisters, audiences see not a duel onstage but its build-up and shattering aftermath.
British
actor Ian McKellen, who, according to The Cambridge Companion to
Chekhov, has “played more Chekhov roles than any other actor of his
generation,” has underscored an aspect of these plays he began to absorb nearly
70 years ago: “more than any other dramatist, Chekhov brings actors close
together on and off the stage. If they fail to respond as a company, the plays
don't work.”
(The
image accompanying this post comes from the 1970 British film adaptation of Three
Sisters, directed by Sir Laurence Olivier and starring, left to right, Louise
Pernell, Joan Plowright, and Jeanne Watts.)
.jpg)
