ARTS . Theater Review

Like New

This assured production of Three Sisters sizzles with immediacy and defies all Chekhov cliches and misconceptions.


	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Feb 13, 2007

In the midst of the Philadelphia New Play Festival, Villanova Theatre's revival of Anton Chekhov's not-so-new Three Sisters (1901) is particularly instructive. Since theater occurs in the present, the challenge is to make any material relevant today.

Director Harriet Power's assured production about three young women stuck in the hinterlands sizzles with immediacy and defies all Chekhov cliches and misconceptions (namely that his plays are maudlin or static). In Three Sisters, every character aches with longing. Some get what they wish for (and the curse that comes with it); most do not. They romanticize the past, idealize the future and avoid the present. In short: they're vividly human.

Grace Armstrong (Olga), Jessica Dal Canton (Masha) and Laura Papay (Irina) bring the title characters to life splendidly. (It helps that, like their characters, they're in their 20s.) The sisters are still dreamers at the start, convinced that their stalled lives will resume when they return to the Moscow they left 11 years ago.

Chekhov writes no evil characters, just people fumbling for answers. The trio's brother, Andrei (Jared Nelson), is moved by local girl Natasha's (Marcie Bramucci) simplicity, blind to her lust for power until he's trapped in a loveless marriage. Dashing Colonel Vershinin (David Whalen) ignites both Masha's passion and her disgust with adoring husband Kulygin (Jarad Mitchell Benn), and Baron Tuzenbach (Carl Granieri) unites with Irina through their shared delusion that hard work — which they've never done — will have "meaning and poetry."

We laugh at first, knowing full well that all these characters will collide with hard, cold reality, but we can't help but become entangled in their flailing hopes. Even obnoxious Solyony (Justin Damm) earns our sympathy, and Power makes us keenly aware of the suffering endured by the silent housemaids (Carrie Chapter and Callie Jacobsen), roles typically relegated to prop-moving.

James F. Pyne Jr. creates the warm country estate mansion on Villanova's spacious thrust, bordered by tall birch trees like prison bars, lit delicately by Jerold R. Forsyth, and Charlotte Cloe Fox Wind's period costumes provide elegant definition. As the old advice to directors (and audiences) goes, "treat a new play like a classic, and a classic like a new play." With a fresh, sincere production like this, that's easy to do.

(m_cofta@citypaper.net)

Three Sisters

Through Feb. 18,Villanova Theatre,Vasey Hall, Lancaster and Ithan aves., Villanova,610-519-7474, www.theatre.villanova.edu