Three Sisters
Intiman Theatre
Through July 9.
The Cherry Orchard
Exchange Theatre at Seattle Public Theater
Through July 10.
The suffering of Chekhov's three sisters, trapped in provincial Russia and pining fruitlessly for Moscow, is foreign to theater, almost by definition. With few exceptions, modern theater is an urban art form, nourished by the wealth of magnates rather than landed gentry, dependent on tiny audiences culled from much larger populations. Theater artists either grew up in cities or successfully migrated there. Furthermore, as much as regional scenes might resent the fact, serious English-language theater is concentrated in two major metropolises: New York and London. Three Sisters is a hard play, not just because it's Chekhov, but because it requires empathy for a craving that you will either find hard to fathom (if you're a lifelong city-dweller) or condescendingly nostalgic (if you're a refugee from rural hell).
Intiman Artistic Director Bartlett Sher (the director of Three Sisters) and Associate Artistic Director Craig Lucas (the play's freestyle adapter) are returning from a brush with metropolitan glitz at the Tony Awards, and much of the cast is imported from New York—but Three Sisters still hangs on to hints of that haughty desperation for urban life. Perhaps even more impressively, the production never loses the undertow of Chekhov's weird, bitter humor. The atmosphere of frozen ambition is first established by the production design, which is at once delicate and austere. The Act I set by John McDermott is especially gorgeous (all rough-hewn architecture with cloudy glass partitions and expensive-looking furniture); and Stephen Strawbridge's northern-blue lighting scheme is highly evocative (though his passing-cloud effects in Act IV are overly ambitious and distracting).
The actors who play the three sisters are pulled in completely different directions by their provincial surroundings. Though technically proficient, the performances by successful New Yorkers Judy Kuhn (as Olga) and Julie Dretzin (as Masha) are too self-assured to communicate despair—in the hands of these slick professionals, the characters can't help but seem complacent. In this production, Olga and Masha have given up the yearning for Moscow in advance of the opening scenes, and I didn't get the sense that it cost them any anguish. It was Alexandra Tavares (recently seen acting flat and indifferent in Washington Ensemble Theatre's Next Tuesday) who really captured me. Her Irina is rushed and cramped at times, but she's also itchy and fervent. She wants out, she wants up, and it's easy to believe her desire.
There are other themes coursing through Chekhov's play, of course, and Craig Lucas has done a fine job of whittling away the merely decorous and culturally obscure. (The characters do, however, call one another "darling" and "love" an awful lot.) Sam Catlin as Tusenbakh and Jay Goede as Vershinin made my mind race with speculation about the relation between the characters' orientation toward the future and their pursuit of death. I was fascinated by Michael Winters's drunken doctor; and just this side of repulsed by Kristin Flanders's apt Natasha. This is an idea play, and perhaps the greatest praise I can give this production is to say that the ideas float freely to the surface.
This is not to say Three Sisters is free of problems. Act IV is especially leaden, and I had been planning to rant about the portentous blocking that sent poor Andrew Weems (as Andrey) stalking morosely back and forth upstage, pushing a black perambulator like he's some sort of Grim Reaper of Infants. But then I looked at my copy of the play, and there was the baby carriage in the stage directions. It's perfectly possible that the aggravations of the final scenes are an indication of the gulf between turn-of-the-century Russia and 21st-century America—my appetite for momentous pretension might be scant, but Bartlett Sher still has to spoon it down. Nonetheless, I could have done without the swing that descends goofily from the fly space just as the ominous guess-who's-about-to-die drums kick into gear.
* * *
It's too bad that Exchange Theatre set themselves up like this—opening another Chekhov play the same week as Sher's production can't be director Stewart Hawk's idea of fun. And the comparison is devastating. Chekhov explicitly labeled The Cherry Orchard a comedy (a word that's given grief to every director from Stanislavsky on), and Hawk seems to have decided that means his cast should talk loudly, exaggerate the physical gags, and make every facial tic visible from the back of the house. Too bad the back of the house is about 15 feet away from the stage. This production of The Cherry Orchard failed to wring a single audible laugh from the audience (Three Sisters got at least five), and I didn't much care about Lyuba Ranyevskaya's fall from grace either. The actors aren't totally incompetent, but the rest of this production takes its cue from the set—shabby, awkward, and bland. â–
