11 December 2005: Chekhov, Three Sisters
American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge. Directed by Krystian Lupa, with set designs also by Lupa.
No birch trees in this production. Lupa keeps it all indoors, even the final act, which Chekhov called for to be staged outside. Lupa is apparently well-known for his monolithic high walls and windows. Here, a cavernous space bordered by drab grey walls, supposedly the interior of the Prozorov home; a sofa, a table, almost lost in this large space. Upstage, mirror-like scrim, through which can be seen a large dining table around which numerous chairs are placed: it is Irina’s birthday. At the highest point upstage, a very tall staircase leading to a single door, some twenty-five or more feet above the stage floor. This yields the divided playing area hinted at in Chekhov’s script. The same set serves through the entire production; the Act III bedroom scene is set in the center of the space, and the scrim is flown out of sight. Thus, also, for Act IV. At the periphery of the space, downstage almost against the floor spots, a single red line running the length of the distance between the ends of the proscenium arch. And fixed into the arch itself, an illuminated (neon, or similar) tubular red light, running across the floor, up the sides of the arch, and a few feet along the top of the arch on either side. It was turned on for extended moments, as if to emphasize the fictional boundary of the illusion.
The key phrase in this production was “It doesn’t make any difference,” and the most frequent utterance of it comes from Chebutykin, the nihilistically inclined military physician, incompetent and full of despair. The utterance resonates as other characters say it, or words to that effect. Overall, the atmosphere established by Lupa is so grim and unyieldingly oppressive that one tends to sense a broad strain of hopelessness in the proceedings.
And yet the three-and-a-half-hour length of the production seems not at all too long; we are held, deeply interested in the action — and there is an action here, in not only the Chekhovian sense but in the more common sense of effective, meaningful drama. As Maurice Valency used to explain, years ago in his Columbia lectures on modern drama, Chekhov’s major dramas are organized by an overarching structural presence: an arrival, a sojourn, and a departure. In Three Sisters it is Vershinin’s arrival that acts like a catalyst on the Prozorov family of three sisters and an elder brother. Although he doesn’t interact with any of them except Masha — who begins by finding him odd, but soon falls in love with him — his position as the military leader, commander of the artillery brigade, seems to reorder the military presence; and when, in Act III, there are mentioned rumors of the departure of the military for Poland, perhaps, or China, it feels like the beginning of the end.
This is partly because of the leitmotif that Chekhov cleverly plays against this central plot device, the ho