The Three Sisters (1901)

At first this play could be entitled Noisy Idiots--it's all very blustery and endearing, and certainly just the kind of warmth and din you'd want on entering the theatre on a January day in Russia in 1901--but you do settle in for some sub-School for Scandal-type proceedings, hijinx in any case. The sisters are bored--bien. Olga is a spinster, Masha is married and bored, Irina is pretty as a sugared confection and doesn't love any of the local notables and gots to get to Moscow where real life will begin. Bien, bien. Their brother Andrei is a big-thought-thinker whose status as the baby of the family has long since shaded into awwardness with the outside world, itself browning into misogyny. And then the soldiers come to town. It's a setting rich with promise--everone's so desperate for something to happen that you know when it does they're gonna milk it. X is gonna turn her nose up at Y, who will be overheard speaking to Z by A, who owes money to B, who is in love with C and her barbed tongue, bien, bien, bien! And everyone leaves a little warmer after "visiting with the Prozorovs," as the Russians were (are?) prone to saying they were doing when they went to see this play. Everybody yells, everybody laughs, the inevitable romantic misunderstanding is defused before anyone gets more than a scare.

Except, just as real family life is never as jolly as it seems over the Thanksgiving table or what have you, things are gonna fall apart for our favourite family (the ones whom we wish we could actually visit, all alone in our big house in the winter with nobody but Sergei and Katya and the children and old "Auntie" Lidia Ivanovna in her room on the top floor. If they seem like such a shockingly real family to me with my how-much-poorer twenty-first-century web of one father, one mother, one sister, and one (beautiful!) niece, imagine the shock of recognition for their compeers).

And I am a deeply ignorant fellow, but I don't kow of an earlier example of dramatic family fallapart that feels so real. No fated Greekness, none of that deep French cynicism about the meaningful life, no arbitrary Shakespearean event leading to mutual assured destruction among all the characters (too heroic to ever live anyway, of course). These Russians are, as they always are, the first and best existentialists, all looking for one reason to stop yelling and feel calm in their limitedness and their mortality, even amid the endless steppe (one aspect of Irina's ever-awaited return to Moscow is no doubt to avoid looking out into that perfect dark).

The point of the family is to keep each other going under unbearable circumstances (BY WHICH WE MEAN LIVING, MAN, JUST LIVING), which means absorbing each other's yelling, caprices, cynicisms. In this family, they're doing a great job--you watch them do it and it makes you love them, delightful self-absorbed Irina, sardonic yet deeply loving Masha, sorrowful and strong strong strong Olga--until the soldiers arrive with their brave/stupid/pointlessly selfdestructive need to scratch at the thin human veneer over the hinterland's dark maw. That is, two of our three destroyers are Vershinin, the "philosopher" (a luxury impossible, irresponsible, criminally culpable, in these circumstances, on the ragged frontline of the bourgeois world!) and Solyony (who I think may actually believe he's dealing with the same black-rye-soul stuff that makes the other characters yell, may not recognize that his father was the wolf or the North Wind or, I dunno, Shiva). But three sisters still outweighs two destroyers--it's when their brother marries Natasha that the critical mass becomes unbearable. Amid so much richly realistic human fellowship and strife, she's the only one with whom it's impossible to sympathize--the provincial petty-bourgeois climber, ruthlessly fighting her way into the manor house, that outpost of metropolitan legitimacy. She is reprehensible, and the sisters--distracted by the soldiers, her horsemen--don't have the stomach. And she usurps them, and the last homely house is destroyed.

But it doesn't burn, even though the village does--Chekhov is too sophisticated, too matter of fact for that cheap symbolism. The play ends with the little pas a deux of Chebutykin: "It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter"--and Olga--"If we only knew, if we only knew!" That's still our problem, expressed so mundanely but so hauntingly. How can you bear what is when there's also a what could be? A what could have been?

We do know one thing: contrary to Vershinin's much-expressed hope, life is not gonna become "easier and brighter"; the whole play abuses him, who on the surface seems its romantic hero. Or at least, if utopia is really out there, it's far, far beyond the horizon--the play ends in the revolutionary year 1905, and on his 300-year timeline one wonders how many Russians will be here to see the world in which the yelling soul is soothed. If we only knew, if we only knew! ( )

The two stars are more for the recording than the story content. I had trouble following the story because it's a play, meant to be seen not only heard, so it was difficult keeping track of the characters (especially the men) and grasping when the scene changed. Also, the quality of the recording is poor: some voices come through loudly, others are so quiet. It's as if there was a mic in the middle of the stage so voices directly under it are picked up, but not those on the periphery. And I'm quite sure that on the 3rd CD the director or sound editor's voice is included, telling one of the sisters that her scream is too sharp, and she says "Okay" and repeats the last couple of lines. How sloppy!
I should read or see the play instead. ( )

Excellent Russian Miserable Git Theatre. ( )

the first play that Chekhov wrote specifically for the Moscow Art Theatre, having experienced commercial success in his previous collaborations with the company, The Seagull and Uncle Vanya. Like many of Chekhov's works, it is about the decay of the privileged class in Russia and the search for meaning in the modern world. In the play, Olga, Masha, and Irina are refined and cultured young women in their twenties who were raised in urban Moscow but have been living in a small, colorless provincial town for eleven years. With their father dead, their anticipated return to Moscow comes to represent their hopes for living a good life, while the ordinariness of day-to-day living tightens its hold. First performed in 1901, The Three Sisters is a perennial favorite of actors and audiences.

"The Three Sisters," produced in 1901, depends, even more than most of Chekhov's plays, on its interpretation, and it is almost essential to its appreciation that it should be seen rather than read. The atmosphere of gloom with which it is pervaded is a thousand times more intense when it comes to us across the foot-lights. In it Chekhov probes the depths of human life with so sure a touch, and lights them with an insight so piercing, that the play made a deep impression when it appeared. This was also partly owing to the masterly way in which it was acted at the Artists' Theatre in Moscow. The theme is, as usual, the greyness of provincial life, and the night is lit for his little group of characters by a flash of passion so intense that the darkness which succeeds it seems wellnigh intolerable.