Joyless in Purgatory

The Three Sisters. If the Hemingway hero was the man to whom things happened, the Chekhov hero and heroine are people to whom nothing happens. His Sisters exist in a sad purgatory of might-have-beens and never-will-bes. Masha (Kim Stanley), married at 18 to a bureaucratic clod, alternately tongue-lashes him as a clownish bore and lapses broodily into tears. Irina (Shirley Knight) has made a hysterical religion of work. Olga (Geraldine Page) is a kind of involuntary nun of duty, serving joylessly as the local school headmistress. The cultured, well-educated sisters are too weak to demand life on their own terms, too proud to beg for it, and too honorable to steal happiness on the sly. They dream of going to Moscow, the perennial illusion of the despairing that life is more real, rich and exciting somewhere else.

It is Chekhov's comic irony to show how sorry his characters feel for themselves. It is his genius for finding the human pulse to make playgoers feel sorry for them too. But if a masterpiece may have a flaw, it is perhaps that Chekhov tries to make pathos do the work of tragedy. If the sisters and the men around them draw their breath in pain, they rarely raise a finger against fate. They are small sinners and great talkers. Masha comes closest to making a breakthrough to life by falling in love with an unhappily married colonel (Kevin McCarthy).

This Actors,Studio production attains a sense of loneliness, emptiness, inertia, and the parched, anguishing inability to enjoy life but only from moment to moment rather than continuously. Chekhov is the drama's Chopin, fragile, lyrical, nocturnal, romantic, ineffably sad. This mood music hovers in the air of this Broadway revival, but it does not permeate the play.

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