Conneticut Post - Wednesday, February 4, 1998
This 'Three Sisters' a relative success
by Shirley Matthews
Theater reviewer
Brighton Beach as a place of exile from Moscow? These "Three Sisters" of Anton Chekov should be so lucky.
Think about it: Masha, Irina, and Olga sit on a bench on a wide white sand beach as the waves the Atlantic crash behind them and talk about their youth. With sun, balmy weather and the affluence of America as a backdrop, their pining the starkness for and harsh weather of Moscow is rather unbelievable.
But in what was obviously a fit of "if it's possible, let's do it" the producers decided to project the sisters as a video and have them speak Russian. Too bad no one told the lively company that a little multimedia goes a very long way.
The video, mostly closeups of the old women's faces, gets boring fast but just keeps going on and on. And don't think the opening video is the last you'll see of this trio. They keep popping up periodically during the three-hour play like some 2-year-old child wo won't be sent to bed.
Ironically, this low-budget production of the Cannon Theater Company is in many ways much better than the star studded Roundabout version a few months ago.
Director Richard Kimmel knows about irony and the social savagery of these bored and idle Russians, stuck in the sticks while they dream of big city excitement.
This "Sisters" cast is a finely meshed company of actors who know how to make these unrelentingly depressed and complaining people both real and understandable.
The homely Baron whp yearns for the beautiful Irina with a compelling self-contained intensity by Jonathan Davis.
"I have never worked a day in my life," he proudly proclaims, then temporizes. "I intend to work -- in 25 or 30 years, we will all work."
Work as the idealized solution to unhappiness is blown theory as Irina (Cynthia Boorujy, who comes to life in the second act) gets a job, only to find that it is not the magic bullet that kills the nagging feeling of emptiness.
"My brain is shriveled up - there's no satisfaction in any of it," says Irina. "you just keep digging yourself deeper and deeper into a hole."
This production is remarkable for its carefully integrated parts (with the exception of the ill-conceived video).
Rachel Fowler, as Masha, was both sympathetic and heartbreaking as the frustrated wife of the Latin-spouting high school teacher.
Satisfaction is always just beyond the reach of these "Three Sisters," but this young company's production is a happy entry into the canon of classical theater.