Best Supporting Roles
By Loren Edelson
Three Sisters
By Anton Chekhov
The Gatehouse
150 Convent Ave. (at W. 135th St.)
Box office: (212) 281-9240
Some years ago when I was translating The
Three Hagi Sisters (Hagi-ke no san shimai), Nagai Ai’s
witty adaptation of Three Sisters, into English from the Japanese,
I asked the playwright why she had been inspired to work with Chekhov’s
text. Among her reasons for wanting to transpose Three Sisters
to a completely different place (rural Japan) and time (turn of the
twenty-first century) was that she believed the supporting characters
were in fact better developed than the sisters, which, in her mind,
was a disappointment and therefore served as a catalyst to write her
“own Chekhov play.” I admit that at the time that particular comment
took a backseat to the more pressing concerns I faced concerning the
nuances of words, oblique references to Japanese commercials, and the
pronunciation of a character’s name.
Ms. Nagai’s comment, however, came back to me
as I was watching Harlem Stage and the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s
co-production of Three Sisters now playing at the beautifully
renovated Harlem Stage Gatehouse, adjacent to City College. This is
a production where several of the so-called supporting characters take
center stage, making it less about the sisters than about their relatives,
friends, and acquaintances who cause them so much stress and suffering.
It might be true, as The New Yorker asserts, that The Cherry
Orchard (in rotating repertory at BAM), with its tale of an estate
foreclosure, is “the Chekhov play for the moment,” but by highlighting
the often messy business of family relations, director Christopher McElroen
makes Three Sisters equally fresh and contemporary.
Running the show is not any one of the sisters,
but their despised sister-in-law, Natasha (Daphne Gaines), who grows
more threatening every time she makes an appearance. While the Prozorov
sisters play the entire show in more or less the same costume--Irina
(Carmen Gill) always in white; Masha (Amanda Mason Warren) in black;
and Olga (Sabrina LeBeauf) in a range of dowdy headmistress dresses--Natasha
dons a new outfit just about every time she waltzes onto the stage,
as if in retaliation for being chided for her “tasteless” sense of style
in the first act. The stage time she actually clocks is not as long
as any one of the other sisters', but as soon as she becomes the wife
of Andrey (Billy Eugene Jones) she makes it clear that she is in charge.
In this production, the Prozorov family unravels because of the desultory
effect that Natasha has on every individual who resides in or visits
the country house.
While she manages to wear down just about every
character, Natasha’s hot-tempered selfishness hits Andrey hardest. He
never quite measures up to the high bar that his adoring sisters set
for him. They expect he will become a famous professor, but there is
something amiss when he never actually plays his violin, but passes
it to the maid (Lisa Helmi Johanson) for her own use; from the start,
he is something of a fraud. But the effect that Natasha has on him is
toxic. This becomes painfully clear in the second act when she kisses
and caresses him, unbuttoning his shirt at the same moment she orders
him to cancel the masqueraders, an annual tradition at the family house,
and telling him that she plans to turn Irina’s room into a nursery for
their baby. Instead of continuing with the foreplay, she stops dead-cold
after delivering her plans. Her ruthless behavior foreshadows her affair
with the chairman of the county council, Protopopov, her sharp confrontations
with the sisters,! and her contemptuous treatment of the family’s long-time
servants.
By the end of the play, Andrey, of course, has
abandoned any ambitions of scholarship to take a position with the county
council, a serious sell-out in the eyes of the sisters. While Natasha
is the one who talks excessively about their children, it is Andrey
who is left to push the baby carriage. While a dad taking his baby out
for a stroll is hardly eyebrow-raising today, in the world of the play,
such a seemingly benign gesture appears to be the ultimate act of emasculation
on the part of Natasha.
The other supporting character who breathes fresh
life into the play is Kulygin (Jonathan Peck). Although he is an incorrigible
bore to Masha, his wife, he comes across to the audience as rather charming;
there is a playful quality about him that lightens the sisters’ moodiness.
At times, he is downright funny, such as when he hops into bed and hides
under the covers in order to avoid a run-in with the drunken Chebutykin
(Reg E. Cathey). While he senses that all is not well with his wife—she
is after all carrying on an affair with Vershinin (Roger Guenveur Smith)—he
truly appears to love her, and when he witnesses her parting, adulterous
kiss to the colonel, he looks on not with hate or envy, but with utter
dejection, making his position even more heartfelt.
So much of the play’s dialogue focuses on unrealized
dreams—what life will be like in years to come, whether the sisters
will ever return to Moscow, will they find satisfying work, fulfilling
love. Somehow the sisters believe that they will be able to escape their
unhappy, provincial life, but their disillusionment is as thick as the
oriental carpets that cover both the floors and walls of the stultifying
set. Only in the last act are the floor carpets rolled up, providing
a momentary glimmer that some relief might in fact be in store for the
tormented sisters. But with the news that Irina’s fiancé, Baron Tuzenbach
(Joshua Tyson), has been killed in a duel, the sisters—and their motley
crew of relatives, friends, and sponges—are propelled right back to
where they started.