Playwright: Anton Chekhov
At: Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway, and LiveWire Theatre Company at Holy Covenant, 925 W. Diversey Pkwy.
Phone: Strawdog ( 773 ) 528-9696/ LiveWire ( 773 ) 412-8089; Strawdog
$20/LiveWire $10-$20
Runs through: Strawdog: Nov. 19/LiveWire: Nov. 13
Visualize four adult siblings raised in, oh, New York City, or Washington, D.C., and schooled at Ivy League preps and universities. Now imagine that all of them are suddenly forced to live in, let's say, Milford, Kansas, near the Fort Riley army base. Could they be blamed for embarking on risky enterprises engendered by 'wicked boredom'?
Masha, a professor's wife, engages in an adulterous romance with a soldier. Olga, a teacher at the high school, toils away resolutely at the job from which she hopes marriage will liberate her. Irina embraces the proletarian ethic, but succumbs to depression when the glamour of the 'career-girl' life wanes. And brother Andrei sedates himself with gluttony and gambling as HIS missus, a local girl with ambitions, cavorts openly with his boss.
This modern analogy is easily perceived in Curt Columbus' colloquial translation of Anton Chekhov's 1901 drama, its timelessness further enhanced by Kimberly Senior's direction. To be sure, Brian Sidney Bembridge's country-house decor and Aly Greaves' tasteful costumes replicate fin-de-siécle luxury with museum accuracy, but we cannot help but notice the similarity between Andrei fixing his attention on his book when his spouse yammers at him and a modern husband tuning out by staring at the TV.
Senior has instructed her ensemble to deliver their dialogue in a deliberately flattened vocal range free of actorly posturing. 'Life is hard, and then you die' shrugs Masha at one point—a homily reflecting a social circle where banality reigns and outbursts of passion are quickly reduced to embarrassing faux pas. But WE are painfully cognizant of the malaise afflicting these troubled personalities, and our knowledge heightens our sympathy for their predicament.
If Strawdog's Three Sisters would feel right at home on the Lifetime Channel, Robert Tenges' adaptation of the play for LiveWire Theater belongs on the WB. We are told by director Chris Arnold that the production's theme is 'paralysis', symbolized by the Prozorov ladies wearing corsets over their contemporary-casual fashions. In no way does this stop them from declaiming at full-throated volume, however, wording their laments in relentless adolescent vernacular sprinkled with girlish profanity. ( 'I'm so fucking unhappy, I can't STAND it any more!' wails Irina. ) The cinematic effect is further intensified by scenes blocked in closely-grouped configurations, making for speeches frequently blurred by the ambient noise associated with the auditorium's proximity to the heavily-traveled intersection at Diversey and Sheffield.
Within its conceptual context, however, there are moments when the 'Real World' iconography works surprisingly well. The absence of suits and uniforms for the men allows a slackerly Solyony to be creepy even before he turns stalker ( even if Irina succumbs momentarily to his bad-boy charm ) , and Suzanne Bracken's costumes underscore Natasha's look-at-me manipulations with tropical-colored garb that all but glows in contrast with the Prozorov clan's drab wardrobe.
Playgoers seeking escape from our own society's domestic conflicts may be disappointed at Strawdog's phlegmatic, or LiveWire's touchy-feely, realism. But nowadays, when individual actions are often dismissed as insignificant, Lieutenant Vershinen's speculations on his own age's influence over future generations, however trivial to his comrades, exhort us to consider the importance of our own choices in searching for solutions to the dissatisfactions that continue to haunt us.
