Chekhov's 'Sisters' act on life lessons

If art imitates life, then Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters is art of the highest order.

That art, brought to life in the Pavilion Theatre by the University Resident Theatre Company beginning last Friday, shows an upper-class Russian family in the late 1800s. Three sisters and one brother live in a manor house in the country and live, love and worry about the changes in their world.

Admittedly, the play can be disturbing. The brother, Andrei (Keith Hitchcock), a promising scholar, marries an eccentric young woman, Natasha (Coco Medvitz). Natasha drives Andrei to gambling and debt, eventually cheating on him with the most prominent man in town. It's a testament to Medvitz's acting that the crowd is able to sympathize with the eccentric, paranoid young woman at first, then grow to despise the controlling monster she becomes.

Chekhov's plays seem to have a fascination with the family life, and Three Sisters is no exception. The sisters are wells of strength for each other, each sympathizing with the others' problems.

Those problems run deep; indeed, the play may be a model for daytime soap operas. The eldest sister, Olga (Jacquelyn Poplar), is a teacher and a spinster. She worries she'll never find a match. The middle sibling, Masha (Joyce Thi Brew), is married, but did so at a young age and grows more bitter with each passing year. And the youngest woman in the family, Irina (Kimberly Colflesh), wants desperately to work and find love in Moscow.

The sisters, however, never leave their hometown. They're entirely dependent on visitors to enliven their existence with tales of the great city, and are ecstatic when Vershinin (Douglas Cockle) enters their estate and regales them with talk.

Cockle and Brew's relationship is definitely a high point of the show. Their looks and gestures across the theater speak volumes about their feelings, and neither performer lets the closeness of the audience break their circle.

The Pavilion Theatre on campus is probably the best place to stage and see such a performance. The intimacy of the medium makes the audience a part of the show, drawing the crowd into the living room of a family in the decaying Russian aristocracy.

It's very hard to limit Chekhov to any one category of play. He maintained that he wrote comedies, and while there were laughs in Three Sisters, the play can't be easily shrugged off like a sitcom.

But then again, neither can life.

Three Sisters will continue its run at the Pavilion Theatre through Saturday. Student tickets cost $6.50 and $8.50.