ТРИ СЕСТРЫ

Three educated women are living in a provincial town they did not choose, dreaming of Moscow they will never reach, and Chekhov makes their inability to leave the most devastating thing he ever put on a stage. The Prozorov sisters — Olga, Masha, Irina — and their brother Andrei live in a provincial garrison town, sustained by the shared dream of eventually returning to Moscow, where they grew up and where life, they are certain, is more fully alive than anything available to them here. Officers come and go. Time passes. Andrei marries a woman of spectacular vulgarity who gradually assumes control of the house. Masha falls into a love affair that cannot go anywhere. Irina attaches herself to the idea of work as salvation and discovers that work, without love, is merely endurance. And Olga — the eldest, the most responsible, the one who sacrifices most quietly — watches everything and says less than she knows. Moscow recedes with each act until it is no longer a destination but a symbol — the name of everything desired and unattained and finally, heartbreakingly, relinquished. Julius West's translation preserves the essential Chekhov — the surface of ordinary conversation through which extraordinary feeling moves like a current beneath ice, the comedy that is always present at the edge of the tragedy, and the silences in which the most important things are said without words. Three Sisters, first performed in 1901, is the play in which Chekhov's mature dramatic method reached its fullest and most heartbreaking expression — a work that asks, with complete seriousness and complete compassion, what we do with the life we have when it is not the life we wanted. The answer Chekhov gives is not consolation but something harder and more honest — we go on, we work, we endure, and perhaps that endurance, in itself, means something.