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Life is good: two Chekhovs in one week! And the first one, Erica Schmidt’s Uncle Vanya at Bard, was so very satisfying! However, in real life just as in Chekhov’s world, the convenient fiancée gets killed, the attractive officer gets transferred, and somehow we never get to Moscow, at least in the present emergency, Michael Greif’s obnoxiously slick and clumsily executed production of Three Sisters at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. This is unfortunate, since it is the only classical play in their season, which has been impressively successful so far.
Actually it would be unfair to deny that Greif has managed his actors’ movements and positioning on stage quite effectively in most scenes and that the sets and costumes are attractive within certain limitations (Those birches really do look tacky!), but as soon as most of these actors open his or her mouth, things begin to go awry. The performance began with a minor, but telling disaster: after a pleasing musical pantomime Greif tacked on at the beginning, Jessica Hecht, playing Olga, spoke, or croaked the first line (“Father died exactly a year ago, on this very same day, on the fifth of May, on your name day, Irina. It was very cold, and snow was falling...“) her microphone input failed and her voice wavered between fortissimo and a dull piano, comically exaggerating her already exaggerated portrayal of the oldest of the sisters. Her delivery was full of vocal tricks, shrill, fussy jumps in pitch, squawks and hesitations, all stock traits of the frustrated spinster, here delivered with no subtlety or taste. Even when her microphone began to behave itself, her acting was no more natural or effective. This contretemps was typical of the entire production. The heavy amplification used throughout did its usual evil work, and more. Partly through seeming lack of skill and partly through misdirection, the actors were constantly fighting against the ‘62 Center’s brutal audio system. Just as it amplified the artificiality of Ms. Hecht’s delivery, it exaggerated the clumsy, stiff stage-speak of most of the others, who spoke in flat stentorian tones, as if they had to project into some huge space without electronic assistance, which was in fact present in abundance and exaggerated every flaw, giving a less than professional impression, as if it were a mid-western amateur production—somewhere in Oklahoma, by any chance? Amplification also spoiled the effect of the cleverly designed set in the last act. As actors wandered off into the distance behind the birch trees, their voices remained as loud and clear as ever. In an earlier scene, a guitarist lounged at the dinner table strumming melancholy chords, but it was so loud that its intended effect was totally lost. The WTF seems to rely on amplification in every situation, even for Campbell Scott’s brilliant turn in The Atheist, a one-man show in the small theater, or most unfortunately, in the otherwise delightful She Loves Me. What is going on here? The ‘62 Center obviously has some serious acoustical defects, but amplification is not the way to solve them. After all that’s been spent on it already, Williams can surely find the cash to hire an acoustical consultant and make the necessary physical adjustments.
Apart from this pervasive shortcoming, few of the actors seemed to have any persuasive or interesting ideas about their parts. Stevie Ray Dallimore as Vershinin arouses little sympathy as he whines about his manipulative wife and intones his boring philosophy in the solemn, well-modulated tones he might use in a commercial for a retirement scheme. The most notable exception was Michael Cristofer, who played a believable and even moving Chebutykin, and Rosemarie DeWitt as Masha also had some expressive and touching moments. Roberta Maxwell was sympathetic as Amfisa. Jonathan Fried (Kulygin) and Keith Nobbs (Baron Tuzenbach) seemed to have put some work into their conceptions of their characters, but they were undermined by their self-conscious and repetitive execution. Irina has a few good moments as well, although her final lines, which are, after all, rather important in the scheme of things, shouted out in her Pollyanna-ish mid-western accent, inspired derision more readily than tears. Was this the actors’ fault? Or was it their director’s, who seemed to be afraid that the audience would not understand the play unless its characters and themes were made as shallow and obvious as possible.
On the other hand, I was never bored, never tempted to get up and leave, and I’d say Greif has a talent for visualizing scenes, not that all the “schmoke und schtink” at the beginning of Act IIIe was particularly helpful. That seemed more like a gimmick to grab the attention of the lazy summer folk before the play got going again. You may think that I’m excessively sharp. I could pass it all over as the season’s dud, but there is something I find truly offensive in this production—and that is Greif’s assumption that Chekhov is adequately served by bland, attractive sets and costumes, moments of falling snow and falling leaves, and decent staging. It’s not nearly enough. One has to have made the ideas and the moods of the play one’s own, and one has to identify with them beyond the level of “content branding,” which seems to be as far as Greif’s idea of Chekhov goes.
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