- Chris Bennion
- The three sisters: Masha (Alexadra Tavares), Irina (Sydney Andrews), and Olga (Julie Briskman).
There’s plenty of traffic on Seattle stages this weekend—Cineastes at On the Boards, The Piano Lesson at Seattle Rep—but I can personally recommend two shows: Strawberry Theatre Workshop’s Our Town, which was reviewed in this week’s paper, and the Seagull Project’s gorgeously ruinous production of Three Sisters at ACT.
If Our Town gently probes at the sweetness and sadness of life, Chekhov’s Three Sisters is a cleaver of doom. And because the Seagull Project rehearses its shows in the old-world, many-months fashion—they spent roughly 28 weeks on Sisters, seven times the usual rehearsal time in the US—director John Langs and his cast know how to wield it for maximum effect.
Olga (Julie Briskman), Masha (Alexadra Tavares), and Irina (Sydney Andrews) live in the countryside with their oversensitive prodigy of a brother (John Abramson) and find most of their fun in two pursuits: socializing with the military officers stationed in town and fantasizing about returning to the sophistication and distractions of Moscow, where they grew up. (Often pronounced here as a squealing “Mos-cooooo!”)
This being a Chekhov play, things quickly degenerate into money problems and troubled love. The beautiful and bored middle sister Masha is married to a pedantic high-school teacher, an ass with a curled mustache (Brandon J. Simmons), but is falling for a lieutenant-colonel (David Quicksall). Meanwhile, the brother, Andrey, marries a seemingly insecure provincial girl who quickly becomes a bullying harpy (Hannah Victoria Franklin). The family estate is dwindling, as it must.
Though we know these lives are moribund—nobody’s going to Moscow—Langs’s Sisters has a strong pulse, and each character’s particular sorrow gets its proper taxonomy.
Briskman plays Olga, the oldest sister, with a resigned, forced cheer. She thinks she’s too old, believes she will never get married (she doesn’t), and wants to leave her job at a school (she doesn’t do that, either). Irina begins the play as a skylarking kid hoping to find her true love in the big city but eventually settles for a painfully earnest baron (CT Doescher).
But Tavares plays middle-sister Masha, married to the teacher but in love with the officer, as a symphony of suppression—in the beginning, she barely tries to mask her unhappiness with her marriage, and then, as her clandestine romance progresses, she has to mask her happiness. Tavares is the suffering but restrained core of this production, using tiny inflections in her voice and face to tell the audience what she cannot tell any of the characters surrounding her. (Tavares gave an equally complex performance as Nina in the Seagull Project’s Seagull back in 2013.)
- Chris Bennion
- Alexandra Tavares’s face gives an almost polyphonic performance of its own.
Peter Crook is equally excellent as Chebutykin, an older military officer who’s also a Chekhov archetype—the white-haired, hard-drinking bachelor, an imp who’s self-centered but also a keen observer of others. Because he feels less chained by etiquette (or basic human decency), Chebutykin is sometimes the lone, rude truth-teller. (His final line, as people around him are boiling alive in loss and death: “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.”) Crook’s take on Chebutykin is both gleeful and rueful—the rest of the characters seem surprised by their slow slide into misfortune. But Chekhov’s imps see it coming from the beginning, and selfishly sink into whatever pleasure they can find in the catastrophe.
- Chris Bennion
- Laugh while you can: Peter Crook as the Chekhovian rascal Chebutykin with Sydney Andrews as the innocent Irina.
Jennifer Zeyl’s set is appropriately stark, with a few big tables for characters to jump on for speeches and 10 tilted poles, painted like birch trees and each bearing a few stage lights at the top, cutting the space into trapezoids.
Langs adds a few directorial touches that aren’t in the script. At the very top of the play, the officers line up on the tables to salute the sisters’ dead father to solemn drumbeats. (Chebutykin, of course, is out of step.) And, before a climactic scene involving a village-wide fire, soldiers sit in chairs around the perimeter of the stage, all looking like they’re in various stages of boredom or dissatisfaction, all of them with some kind of paper they’re rustling—turning the pages of a newspaper, crumpling a letter, and so on. The rustling and crumpling speed up until the whole theater sounds like a burning fire.
The effect is simple but chilling—perhaps the kind of grace note a production is more likely to find with seven months of rehearsal.
- Chris Bennion
- CT Doescher as the baron who has a Tolstoy-like fetish for “real work”—and eerily prefigures the Russian revolution that’s about to come down on all of their heads.
