If I have to recommend one Anton Chekhov play, it would probably be this one. If you want consistency, this is a remarkably consistent and harrowing examination of the human condition at its most tragic. If you want wit, you get ample sidelong observations, pithy and quotable.
If you want compelling characters and an involving narrative, well, you do get the best examples of both from him here. But it is Chekhov, after all, at his most dreary. This is the man who inspired the lyric “I’ve found more clouds of gray/Than any Russian play/Could guarantee.”
If that play was The Three Sisters, Ira Gershwin must have been in one hell of a thunderstorm.
Three Sisters presents a trio of aristocrats, daughters of a dead general who remain at his last post, a small village far from Moscow. Each lead lives of quiet desperation. Olga, the oldest, works herself into a beaten frazzle, avoiding the present by retreating into the past. Masha, the only married sister, carries on an affair with a married officer. Irina, the youngest, dreams of Muscovite freedom.
None are happy; misery over the course of four acts set months apart forms the basis of the play.
MASHA: When you have to take your happiness in snatches, in bits, and then lose it, as I am losing it, you gradually coarsen, grow bitter…. [Act IV]
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| Always dressed in black, Masha is the sister most aware of the hopelessness around her, yet resigned to it anyway. "Bored, bored, bored," she exclaims. Above, Isabella Huff as Masha in a 2017 Colorado State University production. Photo by John Eisele from https://theatre.colostate.edu/events/three-sisters-anton-chekhov-2017-09-29/ |
It’s not the unhappiness, or the bitterness, but the resignation that is such a weight for this play. The sisters have a brother, Andrei, who takes both an awful wife, Natalya, and a sea of gambling debts which combine to force the sisters out of their family home. Andrei can’t make himself care about anything, and while his sisters bemoan his lethargy, only moody Masha makes a subdued, brief protest about it.
That why-bother spirit is pervasive and enervating:
CHEBUTYKIN: I used to know a thing or two twenty-five years ago, and now I remember nothing. Nothing. Maybe I’m not even a man, and just pretending I have arms, and legs, and a head; maybe I don’t even exist, and only imagine I am walking about, eating, sleeping. [Weeps.] Oh, if only I didn’t exist! [ACT III]
Chebutkin is one of several military officers who knew the father and frequently visit the sisters’ house to eat and philosophize. Chebutkin seems to resides there, too; an aging doctor losing his skills.
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| Andrei explains the action of the play best: "...they relieve the monotony of life with their odious gossip, with vodka,
cards, chicanery, and the wives deceive their husbands, while the husbands lie
and pretend not to see or hear anything." Photo by Mikhail Guterman from a Cheek By Jowl production at https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/three-sisters/ |
Another officer, Vershinin, pontificates on mankind’s future progress and annoyance over his suicidal wife as a means of attracting Masha. Pairing these two gives The Three Sisters furtive hints of passion:
VERSHININ: I love you, love you, love you… I love your eyes, your gestures, I dream about them…. Splendid, wonderful woman!
MASHA: When you talk to me like that, for some reason, I laugh, though I am frightened. Don’t do it anymore, I beg you… [In a low voice] But, say it anyway, I don’t mind.… [Covers her face with her hands] [ACT II]
The loss of youth and the inexorable march of time are Three Sisters’ major takeaways, delivered in a wrenching, low-key way. Death is always a palpable presence, a constant as the play shifts its setting to various parts of the house, downstairs to upstairs and finally outside, representing the sisters’ slow eviction from their property and life.
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| Modern adaptations of the play have taken some liberties with Chekhov's milieu, but the message remains the same. Above, Rebecca Lingafelter, Cristi Miles, and Amber Whitehall promote a 2014 production by the Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble. Photo by Owen Carey from https://www.pdxmonthly.com/arts-and-culture/2014/07/pete-s-new-translation-of-chekhov-s-the-three-sisters-gets-aggressive-july-2014 |
I think the one indisputably memorable character in Three Sisters is none of the sisters, but rather Natalya. She begins the play a simple village girl the sisters laugh at for her boldly colored sash. By play’s end, she is the one laughing, having driven the sisters from their own home using her infant children as battering rams for their expulsion. She keeps taking their bedrooms with each new child: “I think the nursery Bobik is in now is cold and damp. And your room is so nice for a baby.”
Chekhov really makes you notice Natalya and her machinations even when she is offstage. It reminds me of his similar brilliance at underscoring and detailing in his short stories. In that and other ways, the play works at developing much of its tension between and around the lines, in the side businesses going on, like the angry ranting of the officer Solyony, or the pathetic status of the sisters’ maid, Anfisa.
The Three Sisters may be best experienced as a harbinger of the Russia to come. Written five years before a period of civil unrest that culminated in the Russian Revolution of 1917, it is little wonder the play was so popular with the powers that were in the Soviet Union.
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| A scene from a 1964 Actors Studio production staged by acting guru Lee Strasberg with Kim Stanley (at left) as Masha and Geraldine Page as Olga. Thought lost for years as a film, it can be viewed on YouTube if this link still works. Image from https://parterre.com/2020/03/23/sisters-were-doing-it-for-themselves/ |
One of the characters, the doomed baron Tuzenbach, practically calls the October Revolution in Act I, predicting an era where everybody will be put to work: “Something tremendous is hanging over our heads, a powerful, invigorating storm is gathering; it is coming, it’s already near, and will blow away the indolence, the indifference, the prejudice against work, the rotten boredom of our society.”
That need to do away with an aristocratic life of leisure is also expressed by Irina, the youngest and most idealistic sister, and the object of Tuzenbach’s affections. Her tragedy is the slow realization over four acts that there will never be an escape for her to Moscow.
In its clash of classes, Three Sisters is suggestive of Chekhov’s later, final play, The Cherry Orchard. There, too, stoic aristocrats get the heave-ho from commoners. In Cherry Orchard, the merchant Lopakhin gloats about the estate he is getting, but at least he offers market value. Natalya steals from the sisters while openly carrying on an affair with the chairman of the village board on which Andrei serves.
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| Olga Knipper, Chekhov's wife, debuted the part of Masha in the play's 1901 Moscow debut. She was apparently the only thing in the Konstantin Stanislavski production that Chekhov liked. He found the other performances too "exuberant." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Knipper |
Did I care? Not really, and I suspect Chekhov doesn’t want us to. The sisters garner some empathy in the way they bemoan the human condition, but they do very little to change their fates. Andrei’s craven inaction is the only notable quality about him.
Of all the characters in Three Sisters, the one I found myself most engaged by, perhaps because he is such a hopelessly tiresome pedant, is Kulygin, Masha’s husband. He lords his learning on everyone else in a way that manages to be both patronizing and charming.
He even declares his conformity with confidence: “Our director shaved off his moustache, and as soon as I became an inspector, I shaved mine off, too. Nobody likes it, but I don’t care. I am content.”
He is no less fooled by his wife’s affair, and is as afraid of her as Andrei is of Natalya, but there is a trace of nobility in Kulygin’s efforts at appeasing Masha’s chronic unhappiness. He knows he is at bottom a key cause of her woe, but can’t help himself wanting her company.
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| The individual acts of Three Sisters take place in different parts of a grand but declining estate. It is surrounded by birch, fir, and maples whose sad fates seemed intertwined with those of the sisters and their lovers. Image of Otakar Schindler set design from https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/SET-DESIGN-FOR-ANTON-CHEKHOV-S-THREE-SIS/D25A0F678D5D8A3F |
Complaining The Three Sisters is depressing is beside the point; it is supposed to be. There are many quotable lines in this regard, not to mention a conclusion featuring an off-stage tragedy and a series of short monologues from the three sisters spoken directly to the audience to sum up the gray spirit of it all:
OLGA [Embracing both her sisters]: Time will pass, and we shall be gone forever, we’ll be forgotten, our faces will be forgotten, our voices, and how many there were of us, but our sufferings will turn into joy for those who live after us, happiness and peace will come to this earth, and then they will remember kindly and bless those who are living now. Oh, my dear sisters, our life is not over yet. We shall live! [ACT IV]
That
last line of Olga’s may be the most depressing thing anyone says, given the lives
they lead. For its craft and cultural impact, Three Sisters is certainly recommendable, but if you find yourself in an especially sad place, I recommend almost anything else.
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