By Kira Ricarte
The play begins, the lights come on, and it’s a girl’s 20th birthday. Thus is the beginning of Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” adapted by queer Jewish storyteller Matt Minnicino and directed by Molly Shayna Cohen. It opened on Dec. 6 at the New Workshop Theatre, located in the Tow Center. It was a strange production, one in which an understandable plot was an afterthought.
The titular three sisters–Olga, Masha, and Irina–dream of leaving an isolated small town and returning to Moscow after leaving the city with their father 11 years ago. Their hopes are soon dashed due to their only brother Alexei’s gambling problem and ill-suited marriage to country bumpkin Natasha, who ends up dominating the entire household. Soldiers from a nearby garrison visited the sisters often, giving the story its chaotic, emotional range and entertaining dynamics. It’s an “emotional rollercoaster,” according to Baron Tuzenbach, played by BFA acting student and singer Jonathan Lewis.
While the important points of the plot are retained enough to tell the story of “Three Sisters,” some modern elements have been added in, which was unexpected yet humorous. The actors speak modern-day English instead of some stilted translation of the Russian play, sing and play modern music, and sometimes go on about their awareness of how privileged they are. All of these things can be jarring and off-putting for anyone who expected a play that would take place strictly in the early 1900s, especially if they’ve seen it done poorly with modern attitudes shoved into the narratives.
However, these modern elements somehow uphold the underlying spirit of a Chekhovian play: one in which Russian characters fritter away the hours talking and doing nonsensical things that don’t add to the plot, while the characters’ feelings and desires broil under the surface.
All of this suppression and avoidance eventually do come out in a myriad of awkward behaviors: furious outbursts, bad jokes, compliments with hidden jabs, unexpected love confessions that don’t land well, aimless rants about time and the future, drunkenness, or with at least one character storming off stage while the rest looks onward, not knowing the full context of why.
All the while, the audience isn’t aware of the full context of why, either. It doesn’t help that at some point, Doctor Chebutykin, played by first-year MFA student Bryce Hunter Hargrove, breaks the fourth wall by turning to the audience and saying, “You want me to explain it all? No.” It’s as if to acknowledge the fact that they know the audience has no clue what’s going on…and neither, in truth, do they.
Maybe that is in and of itself the plot: a whole host of Russians singing, dancing, drinking, smoking, and pushing their real emotions away to the backburner all the while mostly internally screaming to the void to feel like they matter in some way. And honestly, it was quite an entertaining watch, though the ending seemed to drag on and on, to the point that I kept looking at my watch.
The designs done by BC students and faculty are where the show really outdid itself. The set, designed by MFA student Thea Goldman, depicts a quaint and dreamlike house with stained glass windows on the roof. The wall is covered by white stuffing with backlights behind it that make it glow in vibrant colors in certain parts of the play. Hanging windows drop from the ceiling to emphasize how trapped the sisters feel in their home. Furthermore, the floor is painted in a green leaf-adjacent pattern with a rug in front of the wooden porch to emphasize the rustic nature of the world they are living in, a nowhere place near firs, birches, and geese that, unlike the sisters, are free to fly away.
The costumes, designed by BC MFA alum and wardrobe supervisor Sarah Knauss, are deceptively loyal to the Edwardian period, with the women donning shirtwaists and long skirts, the professors in suits, and the soldiers in uniform. Irina herself wears a pink trumpet skirt over a frilly white blouse, which would have been the style at the time.
But in the play’s most dramatic departure from the time period, the three sisters strip away their costumes to reveal gold-sequined dresses and fishnet stockings. Together, they hold mics and sing “What’s Up” by “4 Non Blondes” with two modern musicians and BC students, India Smith and Emily Takeda. This transformation seemed to reveal who these sisters were the whole time: modern 21st century dreamers born in the wrong era, singing “I said hey, what’s going on?”
Overall, “Three Sisters” was amusing, strange, yet fitting. “Hey, what’s going on?”–exactly what I thought the entire time watching it, and remembering it.