Anton Pavlovich Chekhov’s Three Sisters offers insights into the shifting norms of late Imperial Russia, inclusive of the changes in the economy after the emancipation of the serfs, the breakdown of traditional class divisions, and radical changes in expectations around family. The tsarist government engaged in active censorship that created taboos around politics, religion, sexuality, and gender. This late 19th-century surveillance was especially focused on students (who were assumed to—and often did—have liberal or radical tendencies) and members of the intelligentsia. For Chekhov, the student-turned-medical doctor and experimental writer, the theater proved to be a safe haven for his relative progressivism in an alternatively ambivalent and anxious time. Within the social world populated by Chekhov’s stage characters, many dare to be candid about their perspectives; however, they reflect such a diversity of social class, professional station, and generation that it proved difficult to pin down and thus interrogate Chekhov’s perspective. In a letter addressed to the poet Alexei Pleshcheev on October 4, 1888, he asserts his reservations: “I am afraid of people who look for a tendency between the lines and who want to pin me down as either a liberal or a conservative. I am not a liberal, nor a conservative, nor a gradualist, nor a monk, nor an indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist, and nothing more. … I believe brands and labels to be prejudices. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom, freedom from violence and lies, in whatever form the latter two might be expressed.” Regardless of any air of detachment, Chekhov’s concerns for education, science, and the environment, and his ethos of individual responsibility and respect for others pervade his writing. Rather than commenting on the concrete and very consequential social changes around him, Chekhov cleverly focuses on the existential, on our human capacity to change.
Sarah Ruhl, translator (in collaboration*) of the script for our production of Three Sisters, inherits this curious mixture of rigorous objectivity and empathy, as well as an affinity for conversations across time periods. Ruhl is one of the most often-produced playwrights in the theater of the U.S. over the last two decades, and shares much in common with Chekhov—not only open but also eager to play with conventional dramatic structure, inspired as much by overheard conversation as by philosophical ideas about the meaning of life. They are mutually interested in the isolating effects of modern technology, illuminating how we choose or fail to connect with one another. Ruhl’s subject matter sprawls from the origins of Greek mythology and Biblical tales to the invention and implications of the vibrator, to the ancestors of accused witches of Salem, Massachusetts. Her work demonstrates “distrust of Aristotelian thinking” in order to “interpret how people subjectively experience life,” which in turn brings her work into concert with that of Chekhov: lyrical, yet very much grounded in the quotidian. Both on and off stage, she questions expectations and social norms, honoring how we are often enlivened not only by love but also by loss. In her 2021 memoir Smile: The Story of a Face, Ruhl recounts how she was diagnosed with Bell’s palsy and postpartum depression following the birth of her twin children, right as she enjoyed a Tony-nominated play transferring to Broadway. Her experiences (such as judgment on the red carpet for not smiling as she was expected to) resonate with Chekhov’s concerns about the tendency of humans to judge others based on appearances. With respect to the sexism and resistance to new work that she has experienced in the theater industry, Ruhl quips that “being dead is the most airtight defense of one's own aesthetic.” Chekhov would likely have laughed, perhaps out of surprise, having asserted that his plays would last for less than a decade after his own demise.
Sarah Ruhl’s incisive perspective invites questions about identity and self-reflection in the context of the metamorphic, approximately four-year timeline of Three Sisters. Toward the turn of the century, the discourse was peaking around the so-called “woman question,” a social and cultural mode of questioning norms and expectations imposed on women, ranging from limitations imposed by heteropatriarchal marriage to sexism within conversations about class mobility. Gossip was common about how suitable it was for women to pursue education or take action in general beyond that expected of their social class or sosloviia, a particular system of social groups. We see many of these tensions reflected in the characters of Masha, Irina, Olga, and Natasha in particular. Women’s access to education and cultural perception of their presence in the workplace was growing rapidly; however, legal and factual inequality in tsarist Russia persisted, as the overall organization of social life and the legal system assumed a gender binary-based division through which the public sphere belonged to men, and the private one belonged to women.
The Russian ideal of zhenstvennost, or femininity, was rejected by a growing group of young people who questioned the pressure of normative gender-based standards—the performance of womanhood in particular—as a sociopolitical demand related to labor. Chekhov takes many opportunities throughout Three Sisters to comment on norms, but rarely through explicit action, and never through asserting a moral high ground. His characters are companions to change as much as they are to one another, minds and hearts twisting and turning, highlighting what dramaturg Lauren Halvorsen deems “the confusion and glory of being an imperfect person in an imperfect time.” We are fortunate to have worked with Sarah Ruhl’s approach to not only translating words but also honoring these interior states of existence. In Ruhl’s own words, theatrical performance thus becomes “another way to bridge the gaps between us.”
—Dr. Alyssa Schmidt, production dramaturg
*Ruhl candidly notes that “not speaking Russian when you’re translating Chekhov is, of course, a terrible disadvantage,” and that her work was particularly indebted to the support of Russian scholar and playwright/director Elise Thoron and her sister-in-law Natasha Paramonova.
