Anton Chekhov never dug a deeper dramatic hole than Three Sisters, his tragicomic portrait of the singularly ineffectual Prozorov sisters, desperate to flee their deceased father’s provincial estate and return to the Moscow of their childhoods. He all but buries the play alive, filling it with self-absorbed idlers lacking any discernible urge to do anything except lament their inability to do anything. The master of plotlessness (to borrow George Bernard Shaw’s phrase) presents four long acts during which almost nothing happens. Samuel Beckett was at least considerate enough to stop after two.
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The play’s stasis is as inexplicable as it is stifling. Nothing prevents the Prozorov sisters from moving to Moscow. They’ve got money, breeding, untarnished reputations—and God knows they’ve got time. Nothing ties them to their backwater town. Their social lives revolve around the dull, rude, and/or grandiloquent military personnel temporarily garrisoned in the area. Their lone tenant, the aging, self-loathing army doctor Chebutykin, hasn’t paid rent in eight months. Their brother, Andrey, once a promising academic and now a middling bureaucrat, spends his time practicing violin in his room or losing money at the gambling table. Worse, his fiancee (and then wife) Natasha strikes the sisters as a vulgar social climber with all the grace of a drill sergeant. To top it off, a fire burns half the neighborhood to the ground midway through the play.
This frank artifice gives the production a kind of Brechtian duality, with actors representing their roles rather than disappearing into them. In that context it doesn’t matter that two of the Prozorov sisters are white while the third is African-American because we believe through the actors, not in them. More importantly, Shapiro’s approach alerts us to the importance of seeing the sisters from two perspectives at once—and recognizing the distinction between what they say and what they do (or between what they say and what they might’ve said) is key to Chekhov’s drama. Throughout Three Sisters Chekhov weighs his characters’ moral agency against their missed opportunities—what Søren Kierkegaard called the “cleansing baptism of irony”—and gives this actionless play its intense psychological urgency.
Through 8/26: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Downstairs Theater, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $20-$75.
