Russia comes to Saskatoon as the dedicated drama students at Greystone Theatre prepare to kick off the season with Anton Chekhov’s classic play The Three Sisters.

The play, written in 1900, centres on the Prozorov family, landed gentry living in rural Russia. The titular sisters are the motherly spinster Olga, the unhappily married Masha and the young and idealistic Irina, who live alongside their brother Andrei and his fiancée Natasha.

At the beginning of the play, they long to return to their childhood home of Moscow and lament their uninspired existence out in the country. What follows is a tangled web of secrecy and torrid sexual affairs, where each character seeks out happiness in a somewhat unhealthy way and the sisters find themselves pushed aside as Natasha gradually takes control of the household.

The Three Sisters is a “fabulous classic play,” said professor Pamela Haig Bartley, who came off sabbatical to discover that this show had been selected for her to start the Greystone season with. It posed a unique challenge for her, because she already had experience acting the play and now had to take the director’s helm. Luckily, she brings special insight to the production after having spent time in New York studying the play under someone she calls “a mad Russian.”

“Chekhov is often misunderstood,” said Haig Bartley. “People think he’s tragic and dreary.”

One of the goals for this production was to bring out the comedy, which Chekhov always insisted his plays were, despite what contemporary performances of them suggested. It was fun for the actors to seek out the humour in “idiosyncratic behaviour and human foibles.”

Haig Bartley sums up the play’s humour as similar to “Curb Your Enthusiasm, but kinder, gentler and subtler.” Much of the action involves characters who are in love and end up committing faux pas for that reason.

The character humour, however, revolves around some dark subject matter. The slow deterioration of the Prozorov family comments on the downfall of the Russian privileged class and anticipates the revolution that would grip the country a few years after the play was penned. But far from being dated, the story has found new resonances today. Just as the characters are staring down the barrel of imminent change, people today are faced with a new revolution.

“It’s happening all over the world,” said Haig Bartley. “The upper class doesn’t understand they need to change.”

The Prosorovs’ stagnation on their country estate and constant yearning to return to Moscow may have different significance to everyone seeing the play, but much of the theme revolves around “thwarted desire.” Viewers may recognise themselves in characters who “long for something but are afraid to get it.”

The Three Sisters has a cast of 19 that has been rehearsing daily since classes began. While a few personalities dominate the action, the play requires many characters to come and go. Haig Bartley and the cast are playing with stage conventions, simply having characters fade into the background rather than march on and off the stage. It is an exercise in ensemble casting, where each actor must learn to give and take focus.

Any students who are doing some soul-searching or looking toward the future (which should, theoretically, be all of us) should be sure to stop by The Three Sisters. It’s funnier than one might expect.

[box type=”info”]Tickets cost $13 for students and are available at the Greystone box office in the John Mitchell Building. Performances run October 6-15, every night but Sunday.[/box]

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Photos: Raisa Pezderic/The Sheaf