'Three Sisters' yearn for a better life, against the odds

By Mike Fischer, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

August 14, 2017

How do we reconcile our youthful dreams of beauty and truth with what we become in a world of pragmatists and philistines?  Chekhov continually asked the question; we’re nowhere near answering it. 

Hence the ongoing power of “Three Sisters.”  It’s Chekhov’s masterpiece; it’s also the most relevant of his plays to our own mean and post-literate age, in which the better world the sisters champion can seem as foreign as Chekhov himself. All the more reason to applaud the exquisite, just-opened American Players Theatre production of “Sisters,” under William Brown’s direction. 

Initially ranging from ages 20 to 28 in a play spanning five years, newly orphaned sisters Irina (Rebecca Hurd), Masha (Kelsey Brennan) and Olga (Laura Rook) are cultured anomalies in the sort of provincial town Chekhov repeatedly reviled in his stories as backward, hard and dishonest.

Their idyllic oasis is relatively intact when we first meet them, during a spring picnic in which the world seems as young and hopeful as Hurd’s 20-year-old Irina.  Downstage and staring at us with a big smile and faraway eyes, she envisions the family’s return to Moscow, the civilized beacon from whence they’d come when their now-deceased father was transferred.

Full story