This Day in Theater History (Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ Premieres)

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 90^th 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.)