Three Sisters

Even if you didn’t know that Polish director Krystian Lupa is heavily into process — his rehearsals typically entail a year-long immersion experience — you’ll immediately sense that something unusual is up if you attend his production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the American Repertory Theatre. The lights go up on a vast, threadbare salon that is framed by graffiti-strewn planks of corrugated tin, signaling the impending incursions of a harsh modern age. But what’s most unusual about this show is the pacing: The women playing the title roles behave as if they had all the time in the world in which to establish their characters; they wander about, trailing their fingers nostalgically over treasured objects, stomping their feet in impatience, or barking bitter laughter. It’s a case of actorly and directorial self-indulgence run amok. (The perforrmance is nearly four hours in length.)

The trick of staging Three Sisters is how to convey the tedium of provincial life in Russia without actually boring the audience. Lupa’s glacial pacing succeeds all too well in making it crystal clear just how stuck the sisters are: it’s a foregone conclusion that nothing much will change for them and, no, they’ll never get back to Moscow. The salon, with its pentimento of bourgeois respectability, takes on the atmosphere of a railroad station waiting room frequented by successive waves of garrisoned soldiers seeking a bit of social interaction. Some of them, like Solyony (Chris McKinney, overacting the part of a histrionic braggart), try to assert themselves; others, like Vershinin (Frank Wood in a well calibrated performance) and the too-good-for-his-own-good Tuzenbach (a luminous Jeff Biehl), seem intent on forming a surrogate family. All are waiting for forces presumably beyond their control to shake up their world and get things moving again. To underscore the relentless march of time, a drummer — Lupa himself during the show’s first week — thrums an accompaniment as insistent and annoying as a loudly ticking clock.

The actors go about their business as actors, in most cases, rather than the characters they’re supposed to embody. There’s not a scintilla of evidence, for example, to suggest that schoolmistress Kelly McAndrew’s Olga actually suffers the headaches that she complains of, and McAndrew delivers her lines like a Midwestern soccer mom. (These sisters don’t even seem to hail from the same part of the U.S., never mind Russia.) As Masha, chafing at the constraints of a boring marriage, Molly Ward is outright feral, throwing punkish fits that are at odds with the play’s drawing room setting. Only Sarah Grace Wilson as Irina suggests an interior life that might actually match her character’s trajectory.

With the center failing to hold, the supporting cast members strive to fill the void. Two standouts are Julienne Hanzelka Kim as the pushy Natasha and Will LeBow as the comically dull Kulygin, the rural “intellectual.” Sean Dugan is also fairly effective as Andrey, the putative genius brother upon whom the sisters pin their fond hopes — but he’s required to deliver his Act II apologia to them while sporting saggy briefs, one of those avant-garde ideas that doesn’t so much shock as demoralize. Costumer Piotr Skiba, no doubt at Lupa’s instigation, has the women wearing flimsy 1940s dresses that throw off the historical timeline of the play and don’t work at all in the wardrobe-emptying scene. How dramatically can you cast off the encumbrances of the past if all you’re doing is hurling handfuls of limp, rayon frocks?

In a program note, Lupa opines that Chekhov’s characters “are driven by motivations that they cannot grasp.” There’s some condescension implicit in that observation, which leaves room for this scattershot interpretation of the piece. Small wonder that many of the performers in this dispiriting production seem content to spin about like malfunctioning windup toys rather than flesh-and-blood human beings.