As a student of theater, I’ve had to spend a fair amount of time with the plays of Anton Chekhov, and out of his four purported masterpieces, Three Sisters is the only one that never clicked with me. I love the interpersonal stakes of Uncle Vanya and the melancholy portrait of class relations in The Cherry Orchard. I can find common ground with characters like Trigorin and even the unstable Konstantin in The Seagull. But Three Sisters has remained impenetrable. Chekhov’s characters are known for the way they talk around the main points of their conversations, but Three Sisters is his only play where this tendency, elsewhere confined to the moment-to-moment dialogue, is writ large in the story’s overall structure. Despite Three Sisters’ eclectic cast of characters and the constantly shifting dynamics between them, determining the play’s central conflict (or whether one exists to begin with) is no small task. For four whole acts, the play revolves around something without ever fully diving into what that thing is. (It can't be as simple as "several characters want to go to Moscow" or "Natasha is steadily taking over the estate". There's too much dramatic action that has nothing to do with either of those.) Vsevolod Meyerhold once referred to Chekhov’s oeuvre as a “theater of mood”, and while Three Sisters does succeed for me in that regard (I think anyone, Chekhov fan or not, can acknowledge his mastery of tone), I have trouble engaging with the narrative to the same extent as his other plays.
That is, until January 19, 2019, when Yury Butusov blew Three Sisters wide open and slapped me silly with each volley of shrapnel from the blast. “You think you know Chekhov? You think you know this play?” Butusov shouted over the theater speakers, backed by an impossibly loud New Age string section. “You know nothing! Does the Three Sisters you know feature Vershinin headbanging to 2000-vintage Eminem while he gets carpets thrown at him from offstage? Does Solyony dress like an anime villain? Is Chibutykin a prodigious rock bassist in your version? No! Sit back down!” he continued, though I hadn’t left my seat, as the climactic strains of Ravel’s Boléro joined the musical cacophony. He proceeded to repeat this spiel word-for-word until it lost all meaning and I was forced to confront his subtext head-on—a thought process which was immediately interrupted by a wrecking ball crashing through the side of the Lensoviet Theatre. As I lay recovering in the rubble, Butusov stepped over the scattered bricks and nonchalantly sprayed me in the face with a bottle of water, seemingly produced out of thin air. “Now that’s Chekhov.”
So if that potluck of metaphors didn’t make it clear enough, this wasn’t a typical staging of this play. Yury Butusov is nothing if not excessive (even his relatively discreet Hamlet had its moments), and he approaches the insularity of Three Sisters not as a constraint, but as a launch pad. On Butusov’s stage, subtext becomes text, internal conflict is externalized, and the rare moments of stasis register not as lulls in the action but as ticking time bombs. For example: one of the most memorable scenes in act II involves Masha delivering a letter to Vershinin. I’d give a more comprehensive summary, but as written, that’s all that happens—Masha comes onstage, gives Vershinin a letter in full view of Kulygin, and Vershinin responds to its contents with stoic acknowledgement. The entire interaction is over in three or four lines. As staged in this production, though, it becomes something else altogether. Masha enters in a ballerina outfit (a costume choice which is neither referenced nor explained) and delivers the letter to Vershinin, who opens it and immediately begins openly bawling. Kulygin slaps Masha. She leaves the stage. Seconds later, she returns with another letter, speaking the same lines with the same movements. Vershinin bawls again. Masha slaps Kulygin and leaves. And then it begins again, until every potential avenue of subtext is played out onstage and the dialogue returns to business as usual. This form of repetition is used once more in the play, but its effect is the same as any of Butusov’s other directorial flourishes: taking the characters’ textual impenetrability and stripping them bare onstage (sometimes literally—this play had a higher saturation of fishnets and briefs than any I’ve seen). It’s tempting to call this a reinterpretation of the text, but it’s something much more radical (and arguably more directly academic) than that: it’s a real-time, physicalized exegesis of a play that’s already been interpreted and reinterpreted to death. Butusov loves Three Sisters too much to do it the disservice of a simple rework, however indulgent. He takes the play apart and puts it back together again, but crucially, none of the pieces change in the process. There’s just a bit of playfulness added in the end product.
But this is all getting a little overly analytical. More than anything, Three Sisters worked on a visceral level. I had a blast watching all four hours and forty minutes of this show, from its most chaotic moments to its most tranquil. There’s just as much beauty in a quiet conversation between Irina and Tuzenbach (the show’s most peaceful moment by a large margin) as in an impromptu trumpet solo courtesy of Andrey. My favorite shows on this trip are the ones that have in some way changed how I think about my own theatrical endeavors, and the lesson I learned from Three Sisters might be the most valuable one yet: within reason and budget, you can just do anything onstage. And that prospect excites me to no end.
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