Experiments in Realism: A Performance History of Three Sisters  

by Nicole Quenelle

In the winter of 1900, the acting company of the famed Moscow Art Theater (MXAT) sat down to read aloud Three Sisters -- the latest work by the playwright who had become a permanent fixture of the MXAT and whose name would later become synonymous with Russian literature itself: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov.

It did not go well.

"I write life -- this gray, everyday life -- But that does not mean annoying moaning and groaning." -- Chekhov

Upon completion of the reading, the acting company was uncomfortable. Some of them were weeping. The director was dissatisfied. And Chekhov, at the center of it all, was thoroughly perplexed.

"He thought he had written a happy comedy and all of us considered the play a tragedy and even wept over it,"¹ noted the director, Constantin Stanislavsky, who became famous for the approach to acting training resulting in realism and naturalism that dominated Russian theater of the time and later became a standard of acting (albeit bastardized) in the United States in the 1920s.

"You can only holler and weep so long before it's meaningless and annoying." -- Jay O'Berski, director, LGP's Three Sisters

As he was wont to do, Stanislavsky was probably being melodramatic, exaggerating a bit. In fact, unlike any of his other plays, Chekhov had labeled Three Sisters a "drama". Being frequently at odds with Stanislavsky over matters of interpretation (he often accused the director of willfully ignoring his intention and meaning and turning what he considered comedies into weepy melodramas), a misunderstanding of the kind would not have been unusual. But even Chekhov was highly unlikely to have deemed the work a happy comedy, noting himself that the play "has an atmosphere more gloomy than gloom itself."²

No, the confusion and misunderstanding surrounding the acting company and their director was even simpler: they just didn’t get it. The roles weren’t proper. Nothing seemed to happen. The action of the play plodded along in a gray haze with only the suggestion of a theme. When the play opened on January 31, 1901, audiences and critics were equally unsure. "What is it about?" "Why are the plot and character motivations so vague?" "What happens?"

Chekhov’s actors, audiences and critics, however, should have been somewhat familiar with at least some of the common mysteries of his writing. Indeed, like his other major works, the many themes behind Three Sisters (the yearning for love and meaning in life, the necessity of work and its hardships, the sorrow of aging, the elusiveness of happiness) are multi-layered and subtle, with much of the major events happening in the subtext, and in what is left unsaid and unseen--giving the acting company a harder job to convey the meaning behind the subtext and, depending on their success, giving the audience a more or less hard job picking up on that subtext.

Despite the initial uncertainty, Three Sisters gradually gained popularity and went on to become a staple in Russian theater--even if part of this initial acceptance may have been due to the intelligentsia of MXAT’s audiences paying lip service to the established intelligentsia of the MXAT itself³.

In Chekhov’s view, the eventual acceptance of the play could only be due in part to the bits of subtext Stanislavsky’s direction was capable of revealing. Though, while Chekhov often disagreed with the direction of his work in Stanislavsky’s hands, it’s unlikely he would have put it in anyone else’s. Compared with productions at provincial theaters fraught with inexperience and boredom, Stanislavsky’s stagings revealed the characters’ hidden emotions and desires behind the seemingly banal conversations and small talk Chekhov wrote for them. Through the director’s use of extreme "mood" or "atmosphere" (using both acting techniques, as well as sound and lighting effects), profound emotional significance was brought to the surface, resulting in a reality more intense than ordinary life³.

Unfortunately, in Chekhov’s view, Stanislavsky’s method of achieving heightened reality also resulted in acting that was often heavy-handed, overly dramatic when it should have been subtle, and self indulgent. Speaking of the MXAT acting company, he argued, "With the exception of a couple of performers, none of it’s mine...I write life...This gray, everyday life...But that does not mean annoying moaning and groaning...It’s really starting to get on my nerves." ³

Had Chekhov not died of consumption (tuberculosis) three years later, his nerves would have continued to be plucked by the Stanislavsky-inspired productions of realism that swept (and some may argue, plagued) the theaters of Europe and the United States in the 1920s and 30s. Brought to these countries by expatriate members of the MXAT, the productions were overly romantic and nostalgic (even to Stanislavsky himself, who abhored the American bastardization of his acting techniques). But Europeans and Americans accepted these productions with open arms, assuming that, since they were directed by Russians, they must be what Chekhov, a Russian, intended.

Post World War II, productions in the Soviet Union and Soviet Russia began to shift away from realism, experimenting with new stagings that emphasized the often absurd and cruel nature of the human condition--one that was readily recognizable by audiences that had been victims of postwar Soviet domination.

The United States and other English-speaking countries, however, were slower to shift. With at least 25 published translations and countless adaptations, Three Sisters is considered by scholars Chekhov’s most widely produced play in the U.S. Though realism is still by far the most chosen staging aesthetic, experimental companies in New York and regional theaters across the U.S., as well as internationally, have slowly but surely begun experimenting with new stagings that challenge audiences and artists to examine the subtext of Chekhov’s human condition in the context of our current reality.

Modern Russian productions have provided Western companies with inspiration for experimentation. In a 1970s Taganka Theatre production, for example, director Yury Lyubimov opened the onstage theater wall to reveal the streets of Russia--in all their dank, gray spectacle--as if to show the three Prozorov sisters of the play that their beloved home was not the Mecca they longed for. And in a notable New York adaptation, the experimental Wooster Group used video screens, disparate media and improvisation to weave together the play’s context with a more direct questioning of the deep-set beliefs and securities of modern society.

According to Jay O'Berski, director of Little Green Pig’s production of Three Sisters, experimental adaptations like these are the modern theater’s way to make the most of Chekhov’s already contemporary tone and psychology. "The layering of themes is unmatched by any other ‘naturalistic’ play, so much so that it resembles surrealism or theatre of dreams," he says. To convey these many layers, O'Berski says, the company works to "explode" moments to bring the themes into modern context and to achieve a more visceral way of expressing gigantic emotional moments that naturalism can't achieve. Echoing Chekhov, he comments, "You can only holler and weep so long before it's meaningless and annoying." While we have no way of knowing how Chekhov would have judged this modern experimental adaptation of his work, he would most likely be glad to hear that there won’t be much whining and carrying on.

 

Nicole Quenelle is a local writer and actor with a degree in journalism. As a member of Little Green Pig, she is happy to contribute both onstage and off to the company's inspiring productions.

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Sources:

1. Fen, Elisavera (1954). Anton Chekhov Plays. London, England: Penguin Books.
2. John Reid, University of West England. "Tri sestry [Three Sisters]." The Literary Encyclopedia. 11 March 2003. The Literary Dictionary Company. 6 April 2006.
3. Laurence Senelick, Anton Checkhov: The Complete Plays. W.W.Norton & Company, Inc. 2006, pp. li - lv.