Diagnosis of Life in "Three Sisters"

The Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theater has done a nice production of Chekhov's bittersweet "Three Sisters."

The play is about three sisters of the Prosorov family living in a provincial town in Russia. It opens on a day of anniversaries; it is the first anniversary of the death of the girls' father and is the twentieth birthday of the youngest sister, Irina. It is a day of sadness and joy--a day of happiness stained sad--and it will always be so for the girls. It serves as a good symbol for the play: Sorrow or its potential is always present and, if sorrow becomes part of anything, it becomes its essence. And life has sorrow.

Life in the town has become stifling for the well bred and well educated sisters. Olga, the oldest, feels her life slipping by and gets no reward in her job as a teacher, Masha is trapped in an unrewarding marriage and Irina has all the worried hope of youth.  The talented and well loved brother, Andrey, is in the process of disappointing everyone and soon will bring an argumentative woman into the house as his wife.

They all feel the solution to their problems is to escape the town and return to Moscow.

The four act play covers several years of the girls' lives as they search for meaning and happiness, sometimes in work, sometimes in the men from the town's military battery, with the hope of Moscow in the background. The men have their own sadness but the girls, initially at least, provide them with some happiness, and become the men's own private Moscow, but their lives become entangled in the sadness of the sisters and soon become their own misfortunes. The men counter the girls' restless unhappiness with metaphysics, the philosophy of work, meliorism but, interestingly for Russia, never religion. Strangely the men are uniformly eager to deceive themselves and to rationalize while, except for Moscow, the women's emotional eye never blinks. It is no wonder that men are steadfast warriors and women frantic oracles.

Chekhov called this play a "drama", distinct from a tragedy or comedy. True to the definition of art as "a mirror held up to life", it is more a sample of life, a biopsy, than an effort at representation, and rises above the provincial world it describes to a broad and insightful vision.

There was an old joke about the play that said if the family would only be given tickets to Moscow in the first act, there would be no play at all. That could not be further from the truth. This story is about people and life; geography has nothing to do with it other than being just another stage--or another mirage.