2.5 stars

This is supposedly a comedy, but I found it rather depressing. The ending lacked enough closure for my taste, also.

There's some mild profanity in this, as well as the names of God (God, Lord, etc.) used flippantly. ( )

Zzzzhhh...oh sorry, required reading. ( )

ANOTHER depressing Russian play, complete with covetousness and affairs and dissatisfaction and death. I understand Chekhov is great, but I cannot yet appreciate him. It is rather brilliant, though, in its poetry:
"Why on the very threshold of life do we become dull, grey, uninteresting, lazy, indifferent, useless, unhappy?... Our town has been going on for two hundred years-- there are a hundred thousand people living in it; and there is not one who is not like the rest, not one saint in the past, or the present, not one man of learning, not one artist, not one man in the least remarkable who could inspire envy or a passionate desire to imitate him... They only eat, drink, sleep, and then die... others are born, and they also eat and drink and sleep, and not to be bored to stupefaction they vary their lives by nasty gossip, vodka, cards, litigation; and the wives deceive their husbands, and the husbands tell lies and pretend that they see and hear nothing, and an overwhelmingly vulgar influence weighs upon the children, and the divine spark is quenched in them and they become the same sort of pitiful, dead creatures, all exactly alike, as their fathers and mothers..."
Beautifully depressing. ( )

The best English adaptation of this play! Keep in mind, though - this is not a translation. It's an adaptation, there are differences between this version and the original, beyond merely the language. ( )

"Three Sisters" is widely regarded as one of Chekov's two or three best plays (along with "The Cherry Orchard" and "The Seagull"), and with good reason. We witness the decay of the privileged class in pre-revolutionary Russia, through the lives of the three dissatisfied sisters of the Prozorov family -- young women who long for their treasured past while seeking meaning in a society that has come to value "work". The three sisters are Olga (the unmarried matriarch of the family), Masha (a vital and passionate woman trapped in a marriage with a boring school teacher), and 20 year old Irina, who longs to return to Moscow where she hopes to find a husband and raise a family. Their brother Andrei aspired to a professorship in Moscow, but becomes trapped in a marriage to an ill-bred commoner, Natasha. By the play's end, Natasha is in control of the house and the family members, and with their respective and collective hopes dashed, the three sisters are destined to live out their lives with none of their dreams fulfilled.

I had the benefit of being able to watch each of the four acts of "Three Sisters" in between reading the text, and the experience greatly enhanced my appreciation. Indeed, reading the 1901 play gave me little sense of its power, and I deeply appreciated how the actors were able to flesh out the characters through vocalizations and body language, and all the subtleties of stage direction that so greatly enhanced the play. In light of my very different experience in reading vs. watching the play, I'm left with the dilemma of how to judge the written work -- the "book" here at LT. I choose to judge the play as the living manifestation of Chekhov's written artistry, and in that respect, a 4+ star ranking seems warranted.

With a full plot summarized in detail at Wikipedia, along with lengthy descriptions of the characters, there's little point to my summarizing both. Further, there are innumerable literary analyses available, to which I can add nothing but personal reaction. I recommend the play, of course, in particular a quality acted version. The recorded version that I saw is a BBC production from 1970, that starred Anthony Hopkins, Janet Suzman, and Michele Dotrice. It is readily available in an excellent 6 DVD collection of Chekhov's plays. There is also an amateur production by students at a university in Colorado, but it is best avoided. As a performance, "Three Sisters" demands highly skilled actors and stage direction, since the play is so much more than the dialogue. ( )