| THREE SISTERS at Two River Theater (Red Bank, NJ) | |
| Posted by: AC126748 08:43 am EDT 06/22/22 | |
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| Playwright Madeleine George delivers a thoughtful, literate new translation for this production -- she speaks Russian and spent time teaching in Moscow, according to her biography in the program, and her familiarity with the language shows. Respectful without being reverent, idiomatic without slavishness, she offers a fine treatment of a familiar play. Unfortunately, her work is undercut by director Sara Holdren's arch, incomprehensible production, which seems intent on exhausting every experimental theater trope of the last 30 years across the span of its interminable running time (3.5 hours!). From the insertion of anachronistic music cues that seem only to serve the director's perceived cleverness, to having the old servants played by twenty-something actors carrying puppets, to having the cast sing the Talking Heads song "Road to Nowhere" after the final scene (complete with an onstage marching band), it's a mess of ideas that rarely cohere. Holdren, steeped perhaps in European theatrical mores that treat actors as little more than bodies onstage, shows scant facility for building the intricate relationships among the characters. Some performances are interesting on their own terms -- Niall Powderly's menacing Solyony, Annelise Lawson's bitterly discontented Masha -- but there is no sense of cohesive ensemble acting. That's a problem in Chekhov. Nemuna Ceesay's Irina comes across as coarse and disillusioned from the first scene onward, blunting the gradual diminution of her worldview. Alex Brightwell (Andrey) and Kelly Letourneau (Natasha) play the comedy of their material so broadly that it might as well be Noises Off. I think George's translation is strong enough to survive such a misguided production, and I'd love to see it again in the hands of a director who knows what she's doing. But that's not what you get here, unfortunately. |
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