‘Three Sisters,’ Yesterday--and Today

There’s no mud on the faces of the members of the new Mud-luscious Theatre Ensemble for making Anton Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters” their first production at the Players Space.

Few things in theater are gentler and more hazardous than staging the mature Chekhov, and director Albert Alarr and his cast do it with a surprising degree of ease and lack of mannerism.

This isn’t classical Chekhov, where there’s a tendency for too much polish. This is American Chekhov, prone to the kinds of rougher edges and unresolved notes of the playwright’s short stories.

Alarr’s approach, in Constance Garnett’s translation, is to have the rural summerhouse of the Prozoroff sisters set in both pre-Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Thus, there are such things as a fainting couch and behavior that includes the hushed, repressed sexual tension between women and the courtly military officers who fill the Prozoroff parlor.

But the officers’ dark blue uniforms match those of the current Russian army, and during a devastating fire in Act III, sister Irina (Sonja Alarr) is going about in bluejeans.

Also, the sisters’ bloated and empty-headed brother Andrei (Kevin Brief) feels more and more like a suburban husband wasting away as his wife (Fiona Nolan Kelly’s spiteful Natalya) cheats on him.

So Chekhov’s yesterday is today, and even if the gambit doesn’t always work, the feeling of effortless naturalism and intimacy tends to connect in the tiny theater.

Though Alarr and set designer Melinda Batchelor couldn’t find a suitable place for the family dining room in the Players Space’s shoebox layout (it’s nearly hidden from audience members in some seats), in general, despite few resources, they found a way to suggest fading elegance and the slightest ripples of emotional panic.

The best resource here is the cast, which knows this isn’t a Chekhov comedy. Like “The Cherry Orchard,” it’s a play of doomed souls who eventually run out of things to say to comfort themselves as their modest dreams collapse.

Playing Olga, Masha and Irina, Zelma Livingston, Brenda Hayes and Sonja Alarr convey three moods of the same personality, with Alarr the most effective in her expression of pure disappointment with life.

As her equally doomed love, Matt Foyer’s Nikolai is poetic in his quietly building sadness. Angelo McCabe’s Vershinin effectively plays the opposite note--sheer confidence--but is then forced to retreat. The casting of Susan Pingleton as the nasty soldier Solyony calls too much attention to itself, and as Masha’s bumbling husband, Mike Hagiwara tends to play one itchy comic note and no other.

Balancing the old world and new most surprisingly and powerfully is Brief as Andrei. The final image of this shattered father, uneasily tending to the baby carriage, combines visual associations as wide-ranging as the runaway carriage in “Battleship Potemkin” and the overweight, suburban goombahs in “The Sopranos.”

That’s no small achievement.

BE THERE

“The Three Sisters,” the Players Space, 4934 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends Sunday. $10-$15. (818) 982-1510. Running time: 3 hours, 10 minutes.