Three Sisters
Written by Anton Chekhov
Narrated by Jennifer Westfeldt, Jon Hamm and Full Cast
4/5
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About this audiobook
Meet Olga, Masha, and Irina, warm and cultured young sisters who were reared in the exciting hubbub of Moscow, but have been living in the dull, gossipy backwaters of Russia for far too long. With their father’s passing, and the ordinary grip of day-to-day life slowly suffocating them, the urge to return to the city with its rich and exciting life rises to a fever pitch. First performed in 1901, Three Sisters beautifully mixes humor and heartbreak and is a perennial favorite of actors and audiences alike.
The great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov is one of the most influential figures in modern literature, whose classic works include Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard (also available from L.A. Theatre Works).
An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring:
Jennifer Westfeldt as Masha
Tessa Thompson as Irina
Sarah Zimmerman as Olga
Jon Hamm as Vershinin
Josh Clark as Solyony and Rode
Josh Cooke as Kulygin
Dan Donohue as Tuzenbach
Pamela Dunlap as Anfisa
Marc Halsey as Fedotik
Rebecca Mozo as Natasha
Robert Pine as Chebutykin and Ferapont
Reid Scott as Andrei
Translated by Christopher Hampton. Directed by Jenny Sullivan. Recorded before a live audience at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles.
Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov was born in Taganrog, in southern Russia, and in his youth paid for his own education and supported his entire family by writing short, satirical sketches of Russian life. Though he eventually became a physician and once considered medicine his principal career, he continued to gain popularity and praise as a writer for various Russian newspapers, eventually authoring more literary work and ultimately his most well-known plays, including Ivanov, The Seagull, and Uncle Vanya. He died of tuberculosis in 1904, and is regarded as one of the best short story writers in history, influencing such authors as Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov, and Raymond Carver.
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Reviews for Three Sisters
242 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The best. What a great cast. A lovely recording. so thoroughly enjoyed it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The play is great, maybe the greatest modern play of all. These actors, though. Josh Clark as Solyony and Rode, Josh Cooke as Kulygin and Dan Donohue as Tuzenbach do especially good jobs, but most of the others try so hard to be engaging and lively in their voices, it's exhausting. Jon Hamm has a habit (not just here) of breaking up his words strangely for no reason, and it has become a distracting mannerism. By the last act, Rebecca Mozo as Natasha is practically twirling her villainous mustache. It's Chekhov, they need to just live. Not bad, just not my favorite approach to this material. And it's great to have the play. The 4 stars is for the play. "C minus for behavior."
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5ANOTHER depressing Russian play, complete with covetousness and affairs and dissatisfaction and death. I understand Chekhov is great, but I cannot yet appreciate him. It is rather brilliant, though, in its poetry:
"Why on the very threshold of life do we become dull, grey, uninteresting, lazy, indifferent, useless, unhappy?... Our town has been going on for two hundred years-- there are a hundred thousand people living in it; and there is not one who is not like the rest, not one saint in the past, or the present, not one man of learning, not one artist, not one man in the least remarkable who could inspire envy or a passionate desire to imitate him... They only eat, drink, sleep, and then die... others are born, and they also eat and drink and sleep, and not to be bored to stupefaction they vary their lives by nasty gossip, vodka, cards, litigation; and the wives deceive their husbands, and the husbands tell lies and pretend that they see and hear nothing, and an overwhelmingly vulgar influence weighs upon the children, and the divine spark is quenched in them and they become the same sort of pitiful, dead creatures, all exactly alike, as their fathers and mothers..."
Beautifully depressing. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Very much a slice of life drama, but it's a life that I can't particularly identify with. It's supposed to be a "classic" but I just didn't get that much out of it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The play, written in 1900, tells the story of the Prozorov family. Three sisters, Olga, Maria, and Irina Prozorova and their brother Andrei, are living in the Russian countryside. Olga works and cares for her family. Maria is married, but falls in love with the visiting Colonel Vershinin. Irina is the youngest, an idealistic girl who believes she find her love in Moscow. Andrei has aspirations to become a professor and has fallen for a local girl, Natasha, of whom his sisters do not approve. The characters debate the meaning of life, the possibility of attaining happiness and more all while dreaming of a better life in Moscow. The first Act is full of hope and possibility, but as the play progresses and the characters’ lives begin to stagnant, that optimism diminishes. It’s a sad story, no one really gets a happy ending, but the dialogue throughout the story is so beautiful. There’s also a lot of humor worked into the writing. It speaks to Chekhov’s talent that every scene isn’t somber. At the end they are all left wanting something, wishing for more knowledge and a better life. BOTTOM LINE: I loved it. I hope I get a chance to see it performed someday. There are few plays I’ve read that show the drama of a crumbling family quite so eloquently. “When we are dead, men will fly in balloons, change the fashion of their coats, will discover a sixth sense, perhaps, and develop it, but life will remain just the same, difficult, full of mysteries and happiness. In a thousand years man will sigh just the same, ‘Ah, how hard life is,’ and yet just as now he will be afraid of death and not want it.”“I think man ought to have faith or ought to seek a faith, or else his life is empty, empty. . . . To live and not to understand why cranes fly; why children are born; why there are stars in the sky. . . . You've got to know what you're living for or else it's all nonsense and waste.”
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5At first this play could be entitled Noisy Idiots--it's all very blustery and endearing, and certainly just the kind of warmth and din you'd want on entering the theatre on a January day in Russia in 1901--but you do settle in for some sub-School for Scandal-type proceedings, hijinx in any case. The sisters are bored--bien. Olga is a spinster, Masha is married and bored, Irina is pretty as a sugared confection and doesn't love any of the local notables and gots to get to Moscow where rela life will begin. Bien, bien. Their brother Andrei is a big-thought-thinker whose status as the baby of the family has long since shaded into awwardness with the outside world, itself browning into misogyny. And then the soldiers come to town. It's a setting rich with promise--everone's so desperate for something to happen that you know when it does they're gonna milk it. X is gonna turn her nose up at Y, who will be overheard speaking to Z by A, who owes money to B, who is in love with C and her barbed tongue, bien, bien, bien! And everyone leaves a little warmer after "visiting with the Prozorovs," as the Russians were (are?) prone to saying they were doing when they went to see this play. Everybody yells, everybody laughs, the inevitable romantic misunderstanding is defused before anyone gets more than a scare.Except, just as real family life is never as jolly as it seems over the Thanksgiving table or what have you, things are gonna fall apart for our favourite family (the ones whom we wish we could actually visit, all alone in our big house in the winter with nobody but Sergei and Katya and the children and old "Auntie" Lidia Ivanovna in her room on the top floor. If they seem like such a shockingly real family to me with my how-much-poorer twenty-first-century web of one father, one mother, one sister, and one (beautiful!) niece, imagine the shock of recognition for their compeers).And I am a deeply ignorant fellow, but I don't kow of an earlier example of dramatic family fallapart that feels so real. No fated Greekness, none of that deep French cynicism about the meaningful life, no arbitrary Shakespearean event leading to mutual assured destruction among all the characters (too heroic to ever live anyway, of course). These Russians are, as they always are, the first and best existentialists, all looking for one reason to stop yelling and feel calm in their limitedness and their mortality, even amid the endless steppe (one aspect of Irina's ever-awaited return to Moscow is no doubt to avoid looking out into that perfect dark).The point of the family is to keep each other going under unbearable circumstances (BY WHICH WE MEAN LIVING, MAN, JUST LIVING), which means absorbing each other's yelling, caprices, cynicisms. In this family, they're doing a great job--you watch them do it and it makes you love them, delightful self-absorbed Irina, sardonic yet deeply loving Masha, sorrowful and strong strong strong Olga--until the soldiers arrive with their brave/stupid/pointlessly selfdestructive need to scratch at the thin human veneer over the hinterland's dark maw. That is, two of our three destroyers are Vershinin, the "philosopher" (a luxury impossible, irresponsible, criminally culpable, in these circumstances, on the ragged frontline of the bourgeois world!) and Solyony (who I think may actually believe he's dealing with the same black-rye-soul stuff that makes the other characters yell, may not recognize that his father was the wolf or the North Wind or, I dunno, Shiva). But three sisters still outweighs two destroyers--it's when their brother marries Natasha that the critical mass becomes unbearable. Amid so much richly realistic human fellowship and strife, she's the only one with whom it's impossible to sympathize--the provincial petty-bourgeois climber, ruthlessly fighting her way into the manor house, that outpost of metropolitan legitimacy. She is reprehensible, and the sisters--distracted by the soldiers, her horsemen--don't have the stomach. And she usurps them, and the last homely house is destroyed.But it doesn't burn, even though the village does--Chekhov is too sophisticated, too matter of fact for that cheap symbolism. The play ends with the little pas a deux of Chebutykin: "It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter"--and Olga--"If we only knew, if we only knew!" That's still our problem, expressed so mundanely but so hauntingly. How can you bear what is when there's also a what could be? A what could have been?We do know one thing: contrary to Vershinin's much-expressed hope, life is not gonna become "easier and brighter"; the whole play abuses him, who on the surface seems its romantic hero. Or at least, if utopia is really out there, it's far, far beyond the horizon--the play ends in the revolutionary year 1905, and on his 300-year timeline one wonders how many Russians will be here to see the world in which the yelling soul is soothed. If we only knew, if we only knew!
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The two stars are more for the recording than the story content. I had trouble following the story because it's a play, meant to be seen not only heard, so it was difficult keeping track of the characters (especially the men) and grasping when the scene changed. Also, the quality of the recording is poor: some voices come through loudly, others are so quiet. It's as if there was a mic in the middle of the stage so voices directly under it are picked up, but not those on the periphery. And I'm quite sure that on the 3rd CD the director or sound editor's voice is included, telling one of the sisters that her scream is too sharp, and she says "Okay" and repeats the last couple of lines. How sloppy!
I should read or see the play instead. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Excellent Russian Miserable Git Theatre.