Word: serban
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Perhaps as incendiary an example of this revisionism as Brustein has ever offered is the A.R.T.'s current Three Sisters, a production by Rumanian Director Andrei Serban that transforms the customarily lugubrious Chekhov portrait of a doomed family into a knock about farce. Actors pout like children on a stage strewn with Producer toys. Earnest philosophizing about suffering and social evolution is played as vapid bourgeois chitchat. The fondest wish of the Prozorov sisters - to return to the gaiety of Moscow - is voiced as a giggling endearment to a baby. Yet the essence of the play is conveyed with...
...Serban. His three sisters are more likely to fly away than to crumple. They are so unfulfilled, so dissatisfied, that they lack an anchor in daily events. Their lives are not stifling, but rather so empty that the sisters seem as small and lost as vagrants in an abandoned warehouse...
...traditional theme has the sisters being expelled from their family home by their sister-in-law, Natasha (Karen MacDonald). Indeed, the last act of the play occurs outside the house, in the garden. But Serban's three sisters are floating away even before their brother's wife enters the picture. They don't need to be driven out: They are vaporizing on their...
More appealing symbolism surfaces in the series of visual images which are a Serban trademark and which are enhanced in this production by Montresor's ghostly, haunting light design. Andrei (Thomas Derrah), the three sisters' only brother, and his fiancee, the inhospitable Natasha, kiss in the foreground while everyone else in the cast trots offstage in a long line, their faces illuminated and their bodies dark against the back wall...
Three Sisters does not capture an audience's attention automatically; it is talky, slow-paced, and subtle. But it is also a deeply moving, relevant work, with sparks of surprising humor and even a touch of irony. It is to the credit of Serban and the ART that this genuinely gripping production has been mounted. Sadly, it is easy to envision an even more arresting version, in which Serban's odd conception of the sisters' plight did not overwhelm the gentle, quirky, quicksilver loveliness of the play. Even when bolstered by the elegant proficiency of a director like Serban, innovation...