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.
In No Sisters, contemporary playwright Aaron Posner takes up the story from the perspectives of the sisters’ friends and hangers-on. Instead of driving the action, as they do in Checkov’s play, here the three women appear only in their portraits, which coldly supervise the conversations upstairs, which all too often are about them.
Meanwhile, in the downstairs theater, sisters Irina (Emilie Krause), Masha (Caroline Hewitt), and Olga (Bridget Flanery), the daughters of a deceased army officer, live in a small provincial town with their brother Andréy (Ryan Rilette). When the play opens, Olga, the eldest, works as a teacher at the local school. Masha is married to one of the teachers and Irina has just turned twenty. Their brother Andrei wishes to be a scientist. The first scene is Irina’s birthday party, an affair that her brother-in-law, in No Sisters, dubs “mortality with a side of cupcakes.”
The party serves as an emphasis point, showing how much their lives have changed since the death of their father the year before. For the girls, provincial life is suffocating and small and the three dream of moving to Moscow. In the meantime, they fill their days with visits from the regiment stationed in town and flirtations with the soldiers.
Subsequent scenes show their lives first 21 months and then nearly three years later. Although the details of their employment may change, their circumstances remain largely the same. These scenes are filled with a closed-in, quietly frenetic energy. The three are desperate to cling to the last trappings of their fine manners and educated upbringing. Instead, they are confronted with a dreary everyday grind and the fear that they will never have the lives they dreamed of.
Scenes in Checkov’s plays often center around the subtext of the lines, where what is unsaid expresses almost as much as the spoken words. This creates an inwardly focused drama imbued with the sort of internal turmoil and tension that Studio Theatre productions excel at depicting.
The actors play well off of each other, giving a performance that balances action at the front and back of the stage in a fashion that highlights each character’s unique point of view. More than this, they are able to capture the tensions that exist within all human relationships. Andréy and his wife Natásha (Kimberly Gilbert) both love and hate each other. The sisters fight seemingly out of boredom and yet appear to the other as almost a single entity.
Checkov’s play is a masterpiece of observation of human psyche. This performance does the work full justice, depicting it almost as a series of confessions from characters who are all too petty and human. Paired with No Sisters, these human elements are even more fully developed. The result is a pair of plays without heroes or villains, just three sisters, who will leave the audience pondering long after they leave the theater.
