J.D. Salinger, speaking through the voice of Buddy Glass, hit the nail on the head when he wrote, "Have you ever seen a really beautiful production of, say, The Cherry Orchard? Don't say you have. Nobody has. You may have seen 'inspired' productions, 'competent' productions, but never anything beautiful. Never one where Chekhov's talent it matched, nuance for nuance, idiosyncrasy for idiosyncrasy, by every soul onstage." Indeed, Chekhov's oeuvre can prove maddeningly elusive for actors and directors, who have a hard time resisting the urge to overemphasize the understated. The playwright himself was often unhappy with the first productions staged by Constantin Stanislavsky's famed Moscow Art Theater; in fact, after a preliminary reading of what is arguably his most challenging play, Three Sisters, Stanislavsky remarked, "[Chekhov] thought he had written a happy comedy and all of us considered the play a tragedy."
A tender new production of Three Sisters at Classic Stage Company comes as close as anything I've seen to honoring Chekhov's subtle story of frustration and provincial ennui. You probably recall the broad strokes: Three sisters who spent their childhoods in Moscow have grown unutterably weary of life on their late father's rural estate, where the only excitement seems to come from a battalion of soldiers stationed there. The sisters, their brother, and the dissolute officers who gather at their house fritter away their time at dead end jobs, petty rivalries, adulterous affairs, and idle philosophizing. All the while, the sisters daydream about going to Moscow. Like Beckett's tramps waiting for Godot, they do not move.
Performed in the three-quarters round at the intimate 13th Street Theater under the direction of Austin Pendelton, the production is blessed with an excellent ensemble. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the middle sister Masha, who's cheating on her pedantic husband (the amusingly goofy Paul Lazar) with the romantic and intellectual lieutenant Vershinin. That role is filled by Gyllenhaal's real-life husband Peter Sarsgaard, and it's no surprise that their scenes together provide some of the show's most natural, engrossing moments. With one unfortunate exception: Gyllenhaal's trademark sly-sexy acting style is right for the role, but when the time comes for Masha to collapse in a complete breakdown, Gyllenhaal doesn't quite convince—watching her blubber without real tears, you get the sense she hasn't yet tapped into the deeper levels of Masha's misery.
The other two sisters, the spinster Olga and the young dreamer Irina, are adequately portrayed with complete earnestness by Jessica Hecht and Juliet Rylance, respectively.They also struggle with the melodramatic pathos of that final scene, which, to be fair, is written with such abrupt emotional extremes that it must be almost impossible to the tone right. But the rest of Pendleton's production is quite refined and often laugh-out-loud funny. Performed on Walt Spangler's rustic set (dominated by a giant table and a massive old mirror along the back wall), each of the performers coax out the characters' idiosyncrasies with whimsical authenticity. The ever-charming Josh Hamilton brilliantly charts the brother Andre's journey from a rising academic star to a petty debt-ridden gambling addict. Marin Ireland is a total gas as Andre's cuckolding wife; Anson Mount is fascinating as the unctuous, murderous Solyony; and Louis Zoric delights in the role the sodden old doctor Chebutykin.
They're all having fun, which makes the three hour production fun to watch. Even as very little happens in the conventional dramatic sense, this Three Sisters succeeds because the ensemble opens a window into the emotional turbulence roiling beneath the static surface. So is it a comedy or tragedy? Like life, it's both.
