STAGE REVIEW : LOOKING AT ‘3 SISTERS’ AS LOONIES

Stanislavsky had so many people swatting mosquitoes in the first production of “The Cherry Orchard” that Chekhov threatened to insert a line about the unusual absence of insects in the district. One wonders what his reaction would be to some of the innovations in Stein Winge’s staging of “Three Sisters” at the new Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Winge’s diagnosis of Chekhov’s three sisters and their friends isn’t that they’re overwound or overbred. It is that they are flat-out, falling-down loonies. And I do mean falling-down, starting with Olga (Meg Foster), whose first speech about its being a year since Father died is delivered from the floor, she having taken a spill.

Baby sister Irina (Ann Hearn) seems to be on the mat half the time--swooning is one of her favorite activities. Masha (Kim Cattrall) generally keeps to her feet, but looks daggers at everybody. As for their gentleman callers, Tusenbach (Stephen Tobolowsky) is a real disaster area, forever crashing into the furniture or putting his hand into the food. And the first act ends with a big laugh as brother Andrey (Gregory Wagrowski) sits on the birthday cake.

What is going on here? Timian Alsaker’s dislocating set (a French Provincial mantelpiece backed up against a blank gray wall, etc.) does not suggest that director Winge has confused “Three Sisters” with “You Can’t Take It With You.”

He’ll take what laughs he can get, but the real intention is to rescue Chekhov’s characters from the usual evocative gloom and to be explicit, for once, about what’s ailing them. They are “nerve cases” who need to be shocked back into phase.

Russia before the Revolution as Ward Eight. It works on paper, but it doesn’t work at Los Angeles Theatre Center for reasons that Chekhov once touched on in a letter to his brother--also a writer: “I regretted the fact that you placed your characters in an insane asylum. The reader fails to trust psychically a man who is ill.”

Or to care, after a point. After the audience has had its fill laughing at the antics of these zanies, which takes about an act, it has a hard time keeping in contact with them. That’s because it’s never been clearly established who they are. The trouble with crazy people as stage characters is that they’re too much alike.

Olga is an example. Sending her sprawling may have its advantages, both as comedy and as a signal that this isn’t going to be one of those hushed productions of Chekhov. But the bumptiousness of the image makes it hard for us to see her as a refined woman who is mortified at the thought of doing battle with her vulgar sister-in-law, Natasha (Caitlin O’Heaney).

Surely that’s a theme of the play--that Chekhov’s three sisters haven’t been taught to grab for life, as perhaps one has to do in this grubby world. The point is pretty much lost in a production where rolling around on the floor isn’t a solecism but a way of life.

Another theme of “Three Sisters” is frustration. It’s not furthered by a production where everybody gives instant vent to whatever feeling comes along. This can pass for Russian “soul” for a time. But after a couple of hours--and this show lasts 3 1/2 hours--it begins to look like actors indulging themselves (and repeating themselves).

It’s not that we want lifted-pinky Chekhov or that “concept” Chekhov is a sacrilege. Some strange things also went on in the La Jolla Playhouse’s recent “The Sea Gull.” But they unloosed new possibilities in the play and in Chekhov’s general approach to drama. This approach flattens “Three Sisters” to a simple case of hysteria that a capable playwright could dispose of in one act.

Too bad, for this cast is capable of finer-boned playing than they’re allowed here. We have a sense of how satisfying Foster could have been as Olga in a wonderful moment during the fire scene when she and Masha’s hopeless husband Kulygin (Barry Michlin) draw together. Something unspoken hovers . . . and then, whoops, she tumbles into the trunk.

For all his clumsiness, Tobolowsky’s Tusenbach is also allowed a finer side, and Cliff DeYoung’s Vershinin has considerable dignity, though he’s too young for the role. Gerald Hiken’s Dr. Chebutykin enjoys his misery too much, even for a Chekhov drunk.

A nice incidental touch: Andrey’s out-of-tune violin playing as the white filmy curtain rolls away and the play begins. Alsaker’s setting, his lightly satirical costumes and his unsentimental lighting support Winge’s approach to the play admirably. But when they are hanging the washing in the Prozorovs’ drawing room by Act II, what’s left for Acts III and IV?

P.S. We had voiced some apprehension about the view from the balcony in Theatre 1, where “Three Sisters” is being played. It’s fine.