Irina (Essence Brown, left) listening to Masha’s pedantic husband Kulygin (Tommy Schrider), in Will Pomerantz’s adaption of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
It seems to never be a bad time to stage Chekhov’s Three Sisters: timeless and timely, funny and devastating, remarkably in tune with the currents of real life, and providing material for great actors to explore memorable and fully rounded characters.
But beware, also, that many theatergoers will have a cache of productions of the play stored in their memory, comparing and contrasting, even unconsciously, at every turn (two patrons behind me had an intermission conversation about where the dining scenes “usually” take place in relation to the rest of the set). This will especially be the case for a production that claims that “audiences will experience afresh what makes this writer so memorable and indispensable,” as does the new interpretation playing at the Sheen Center, adapted and directed by Will Pomerantz. There are pleasures to be had in this production, particularly in the second act, but it is uneven overall, at times too broad, at others strangely flat, and never quite managing to make the characters emerge with that signature Chekhovian reality.
Irina sharing a moment with her eldest sister, Olga (Elizabeth Ramos). Photographs by Russ Rowland.
Presented by Blueprint Productions, Three Sisters is playing in repertory, as “Turgenev + Chekhov,” alongside About Love, a musical adaptation of Turgenev’s First Love, with music and lyrics by Nancy Harrow. While Three Sisters does not have songs, it is scored in jazz by Harrow, with music performed by a live jazz quartet.
Perhaps they need no introduction, but Three Sisters revolves around the hopes and struggles of the Prozorov sisters: Olga (Elizabeth Ramos), the oldest, an unmarried schoolteacher; Masha (Amanda Kristin Nichols), the witty and sardonic middle sister, unhappily married to the pedantic Kulygin (Tommy Schrider); and Irina (Essence Brown), the youngest, who struggles to accept dreary reality over romantic dreams. All the sisters, but especially Irina, long desperately to leave the provinces and return to the Moscow of their former days, a city depicted in their memories as a kind of Shangri-la.
Masha (Amanda Kristin Nichols, left) with her lover, Vershinin (Nehal Joshi).
The brother of the three sisters, Andrei (Miles G. Jackson), an ineffectual would-be scholar, marries Natasha (Silvia Bond), who, driven by feelings of inferiority, ends up as cruel and domineering toward the sisters and the servants, and in an affair with the local council president, Protopopov (who never appears on stage), as her husband gambles away all their money and any hope of a return to Moscow for the sisters.
Much of the story is driven by the soldiers who are garrisoned in the town, including the Baron (Tom Patterson), smitten with Irina but looking like “a potato in a suit”; Vershinin (Nehal Joshi), the commanding officer with a philosophical bent and a suicidal wife, who begins a love affair with Masha; and Solyony (Harrison Bryan), an antisocial misfit. Rounding out the primary characters is Chebutykin (John Ahlin), an older, alcoholic doctor who claims to have forgotten all about medicine and was in love with the sisters’ mother and dotes on them, especially Irina, his “little bird.”
Irina with her family’s elderly, long-time servant and nurse, Anfisa (Jean Tafler).
The costumes, designed by Whitney Locher, and the minimalist scenic design, by Brian Staton, are roughly of the period (late nineteenth century); the text has been adapted by Pomerantz (it isn’t mentioned which translation he is working from), and although it isn’t modernized, the dialogue at times feels torn between trying to sound colloquial and trying to sound old-fashioned. At its best moments the production is competent, yet the characters are still not fully embodied, lending an antiseptic quality that lessens the weight of their predicaments and the more tragic aspects of the play. While the addition of music is a novel idea, it’s not really integrated into the production: the jazz quartet plays briefly at the scene changes during the 2½-hour running time. Nothing is gained in atmosphere or emotion by the music, other than the somewhat awkward experience of watching the members of the quartet sit beside the stage in silence for almost the whole time. Perhaps music could have been used to punctuate the scenes, for example, between Masha and Vershinin, but instead one is left wondering at the choice to include the music so marginally.
The production does admirably pick up after the intermission, and the actors are able to convey some of the play’s emotional complexity, longing, and heartbreak, but it’s never quite clear what the purported fresh look at the play is supposed to be exactly. On a literal level, the story is ably told: if this is someone’s first production of Three Sisters, everything will be clear, except perhaps why others keep eagerly returning to this play.
Three Sisters runs through June 5 at the Sheen Center (18 Bleecker St.). It is running in repertory with About Love, so performance days and times vary. For schedule information and tickets, see sheencenter.org/chekhov-turgenev.
