Many theater buildings in Washington house more than one stage. Generally they are at opposite ends of a long hall, or one is tucked away in a spare corner. It is far more unusual for the stages to be stacked on top of one another, as they are in Studio Theatre, where the two stages are connected via a backstage staircase. This is a small architectural detail, but the unique design is crucial to the staging of this production, paired performances of Anton Checkov’s Three Sisters and Aaron Posner’s No Sisters, performed simultaneously and by the same cast. While Three Sisters is being performed downstairs, the actors playing the secondary characters are also appearing in No Sisters on the upper stage, running back and forth between the productions.
The idea is as audacious as it is ambitious. Not only is the theater attempting to run the two plays at the same time, but with the addition of No Sisters, it is adding on the original play, trying to preserve the characterization and tone of the original while expanding the story in different directions. Oddly enough, this is much of why the idea works as well as it does. Instead of competing with the original work, No Sisterscomplements it by developing characters like the soldiers Solyóny (Biko Eisen-Martin) and Fedótik (William Vaughan), who appear only briefly in the original play.
