'Three Sisters' captures despair, hope

Last weekend, Viterbo’s theatre and music theatre department finished its run of “Three Sisters,” Anton Chekhov’s classic play of desperation and disillusionment in early 20^th century Russia. Digging deeply into the translated text, the production managed to balance both laughter and a stirring pathos, taking the sisters’ emotional turmoil seriously, but never letting the characters sink into a caricature of despair.

Throughout the production the static progression of each character’s lives can be felt, as each sister pines for Moscow and the hope that they associate with the city. The sisters each progress through the show in varying degrees of submission and defiance to their fate in the small town that suffocates them.

Olga, played with practical severity by Charlotte Parker, strives to gain any amount of independence from her seemingly inevitable fate to become a spinster schoolteacher.  

Molly Pach’s Masha is beautifully rendered as a woman who has trapped herself in her small, provincial married life, and who, day by day, loses her tenuous grasp to sanity with the small triumphs of love and art she can find. Her affair with Vershinin, a married officer played by Walter Elder, and her husband, Kulygin, played by Matt Barnett, reaction to it, depict the struggle against a placid life of hollow pleasantry and the consuming, passionate, and fleeting happiness that she knows from its onset can never remain.

The youngest sister, Irina, played by Courtney Toepel, gradually descends into the suffocating despair of the redundant, small life the family leads, as her arc throughout the play shows her crash from a hopeful youth to someone who looks to getting by with whatever small happiness she can find in life.

Their brother, Prozorov, played with compassion by Ryan Claussen, is the man that they all looked to bring them a better life, but whose failure to become anything but a small, henpecked man proves to them the meandering pointlessness of their grand aspirations. To further irritate, there is Natalya, Prozorov’s wife, played by Afton Everett, whose childish demands and manipulations lead her to be the only happy, if maniacal, person in the household, as she rises in her ranks while the other characters’ dreams are shattered one by one.

The heartbreaking futility of the characters’ attempts to bring some sort of lasting happiness into their lives is balanced skillfully with small moments of joviality and laughter, as the sisters interact with the soldiers in town, playing piano and joking, remembering small merriment. The aching and longing, however, for a world beyond the small one they inhabit, pervades the play, as the only hope that they are left with is to survive in such a way that happiness can be brought to future generations; that there will be a future that knows why the world behaves as it does, and is made the better for it.