Plenty of Food for Thought in La Jolla’s ‘The Three Sisters’

One of the enduring fascinations of theatergoing is the way different people can watch the same production and yet come away with wildly divergent impressions. It’s not for nothing that restaurants buy ad space on the backs of theater tickets--they know they’ll fill their tables with patrons eager to discuss the subtle nuances of this particular vocal inflection or that specific stage movement.

Usually, the most thoughtful analyses to emerge from these late-night brandy klatches come from those who have thrown themselves open the widest to the production’s interpretive artists--those with the fewest preconceived notions of how the play should look and sound.

Judging from the tenor of Sylvie Drake’s review of Des McAnuff’s “Three Sisters” at the La Jolla Playhouse (Calendar, May 14), Drake was so put off by John Arnone’s set that an opinion may have been established at the rise of the Act I curtain.

Too bad, because she missed a fresh, fully considered illumination of that great play that challenges the musty pallor that has hung over it for so long.

Above all, this production invites the audience in and demonstrates, entertainingly and without revisionism, why it deserves consideration as the touchstone of modern drama.

First, about that set. Drake takes lengthy exception to the “creamy sumptuousness” of the Prozorov estate, saying that while “gorgeous,” it’s “wrong for the Victorian time and oppressive place.” The fact is, the Prozorov family was as close to nobility as anyone in the provincial town of the play could be.

Much is made of Olga, Masha and Irina’s late father’s elevated standing in the community--his position as commanding general of the region’s 6,000-man army would have made him one of the most powerful men in the Russian military. The house had long been an oasis to which the more cultured townspeople routinely flocked. The town might be gloomy, but the estate isn’t.

More important, by making the setting from which the sisters so ardently want to escape a beautiful one, designer and director give the audience a visual key to the production’s main point. The sisters’ famous “exile” isn’t a physical one but rather an exile of the mind and heart. This isn’t about getting to Moscow, McAnuff is saying, it’s about a generation that wills itself into chronic inaction by living in the land of “What If?” instead of in the here and now.

What could be more contemporary, or more a prelude to “Godot”? Once more, the set illustrates the inevitable outcome of such thinking by becoming increasingly claustrophobic as the sisters’ external options fall away one by one.

The true masterstroke here is the director and cast’s success in making such heady concepts accessible to audiences conditioned to equating “Chekhovian” drama with unrelenting gloom and doom.

McAnuff and his actors understand that Chekhov’s genius is in the nuance that allows you to see both the comedy and the tragedy of life at once, and here they harpoon a tradition of heaviness that stretches back as far as the first Stanislavski-directed productions with which Chekhov expressed such disappointment.

Given all the historical baggage, any laughter in “Three Sisters” is hard-won, and the consistency of response at the performance I saw could only have come if the company were communicating with each other and, by extension, with the audience, on a deep and very real level. Ultimately, tragedy leavened with humor is tragedy all the more keenly felt.

Drake contends that “the heart of the problem . . . is a company of actors that does not interrelate.” While judgment of individual performances is a subjective thing, I doubt that the wrenching howl of anguish from Nancy Travis’ Masha upon her Act IV separation from Michael McGuire’s forbidden lover Vershinin would have sent such palpable shock waves through the theater had there been “not a spark of ardor,” as Drake suggests, between them through the first three acts.

Similarly, could Susan Berman’s grasping Natasha and Jon Lovitz’s sad, preening Kulygin have elicited the sympathy they did had they not been working and connecting with the others with subtle complexity?

Would the final hint of redemption for the sisters be so devoutly wished for if we didn’t care about them? Not likely.

The cliche is that the critic’s only power is to keep people away from the theater, but in the best of all worlds his or her job should be to stimulate discussion and, if warranted, impassioned dissent. If conversations overheard in the lobby after the show are any indication, Drake achieved the latter. For this, I’m sure, late-night restaurateurs all over La Jolla thank her.