Chekhov & Beckett: Weird on Top, Wild at Heart  

by John Justice

Chekhov is Beckett with a twist. The usual first impression of Beckett is weirdness. Two tramps: waiting, waiting. A cheerful woman buried in an (advancing) mound of dirt. A room with a blind man who can't stand up, a helper who can't sit down, and two people in garbage cans. But if you dive into Beckett, you're rewarded with something else: the logic and fun and very accessible truths he's poking around after. It remains weird, but in the same way that it's ineluctably weird to be a human being zooming tombward from the womb; and aware of it at every moment.

By contrast, Chekhov's plays, with their samovars and tea cups and French windows and (if the theater's got the budget for it) chandeliers, look deceptively real, naturalistic. Nor does his perfectly plain language reek of oddness. However, take a look at some of the things that happen (or don't) in Three Sisters: The sound of a gunshot that kills an important character floats into the Prozorovs' fading mansion; no one comments. Again, from outside the house come the marching footsteps of the soldiers leaving, driving another nail in the coffin for the three sisters' dreams. Nobody gets up to see. Or, an old family friend drops and breaks a family clock; and instead of apologizing, he suggests the event didn't happen. No one disputes him.

And of course, there's the apparent mainspring of the play: "To Moscow!" That's all the Prozorov sisters seem to want. Yet the more they claim that's where they're going, the surer we can be that they won't get one verst closer to the place. Any more than Godot will show up for Vladimir and Estragon. Why don't they go to Moscow? The sisters claim to be peacocks stuck in the mud of their unnamed hick town. They can ambulate, the family's on the downslide but still have some coins to jingle. "Everyone" asks the question, and Richard Gilman had a stern answer. Condensed, it is that:

"... the play proposes other values and offers a different perspective: what it's like to be alive here, now, beyond social situation and idiosyncratic fate, in this drama of inconclusiveness and acceptance of mystery."

That is, Olga, Irina and Masha don't go to Moscow for the same reason we don't give our world, in our time, the full blast of heart, mind, muscle and spirit. The same reason we dole out pieces of ourselves and squirrel away big ambitions and big love. The same reason fear of humiliation chokes us to silence and inaction.

It doesn't at all devalue "To Moscow!" that the sisters don't go. It remains a given and honorable real thing in the only story we have-the one Chekhov gives us. And the dream of Moscow has scope and value that in fact shine in bright contrast to another reoccuring sentiment in Three Sisters, a worldview expressed by many of the characters:

Vse ravno -- What's the use? What does it matter? Or, as we 21st-century dreamers put it:

"Whatever."

John Justice is a playwright, board member of Little Green Pig, and member of the Dramatists Guild of America.