Fever dream

Three Sisters is humorous and dramatic

by Bill Rodrgiguez

THREE SISTERS. By Anton Chekhov. Directed by Spencer Golub. With Alison Cimmet, Susan Deily-Swearingen, Katharine Powell, Adam Arian, Brian Tallevi. At Brown University Theatre through March 28.

This is not your mother's Chekhov. The Brown University Theatre production of Three Sisters -- the play that gained Anton his rep as playwright extraordinaire -- is not the classic of realistic drama that was originally imagined. Directed beyond design specifications to within an inch of its life, what was written as drama with humorous elements has been taken apart molecule by thematic molecule and reconstructed by Spencer Golub, surreally and brilliantly.

As indicated by the three doors we see when the play begins, in the well-conceived set design by John R. Lucas, it has the finger-popping pace and broad humor of a slammed-door farce. With a difference. We're in black comedy territory here, with "Over the Rainbow" and the theme music from I Love Lucy as recurring motifs. The general effect is that of Happy Face stickers on a hurtling hearse.

The play invites absurdist contrasts because everybody is always instructing others about how to be happy, or is convinced that they themselves would finally attain joy if only they had the lover they're mooning over. The central delusion of that sort is over the sisters wanting to move from the small town where the play is set, to Moscow where unspoken sophistications would surely induce bliss. The giddiest holder of this notion is Irina (Katherine Powell), whose 20th birthday it is when we begin. The youngest of the sisters, she proclaims that between Moscow and the virtues of hard work, she will find unceasing happiness.

Hah! To be enlightened about her untested work ethic, all she had to do was pay attention to the hell that sister Olga (Alison Cimmet) inhabits as a schoolmistress for young girls. Irina's male equivalents are Col. Vershinin (Adam Arian), whose cheery talk sounds thinner when he jokes about how his wife keeps attempting suicide to get his attention; and Kulygin (Brian Tallevi), a fatuous high school teacher who wears his foolishness like an impregnable shield. His wife is sister Masha (Susan Deily-Swearingen), who when she was 18 thought the sun rose and set on his loquacious pronouncements but now broods and sees him as a fool.

As with Russian novels, audiences must have paid by the character, for there are 14, too many to single out all the actors who stand out in this fine production. But Golub's staging is so imaginative and constantly on the mark that it gives them plenty of moments to shine as the Pollyanna theme gets filled out. This Three Sisters is a fevered dream Chekhov might have had while gestating the play. Farce notwithstanding, the grim underlying seriousness is kept in our face. For example, the I Love Lucy theme starts to swell and the three doors impatiently start to rise three or four times, each time interrupted because somebody is turning the conversation, however lightly, to sober matters. That corresponds wonderfully to the characters' most tragic common trait, their eagerness to be distracted from reality.

Another device that works nicely is having characters speak through a stage-front microphone when voicing their most sincere feelings, whether individually or in conversation. (Heartfelt thoughts do have a certain karaoke component, don't they?)

The striking image at the final curtain is of everyone smiling and basking in the glow of a TV as sitcom music swells. Chekhov was amazed that so many people refuse to see the skull beneath the grinning skin. Director Golub's incisive realization of Three Sisters amplifies that concern of the playwright in a way that only non-naturalistic staging, and marvelous inventiveness, can accomplish. If you want to see theater at its most involving and most accomplished, don't miss this one.