An Estimable Chekhov

...Shirley Knight carries the role of Irina, the youngest sister, with delicacy from the early birthday happiness through the final scene in which Tusenbach, who was to marry her and lead her into a new life, is reported shot...

...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel An Estimable Chekhov IN his revival of The Three Sisters, the most estimable production so far by the Actors Studio and a theatrical oasis of sorts at the end of a dusty season, Lee Strasbcrg demonstrates an affection for Chekhov...

...one can say that this truly is a company and has a style because its members understand one another...

...All the same, there is too much waiting around while the diva-like Kim Stanley as Masha and Albert Paulsen as Kulygin pad out the gaps between their sentences with explanatory sighs and signals...

...In a program note Strasberg thanks Tamara Daykahanova, a former Moscow Art Theater actress who plays the nurse Anfisa, "for her aid in production details," and one accepts that this is how The Three Sisters might have looked under Stanislavski's supervision: grave, autumnal, brushed by tragedy...

...whereas Chekhov's letters and statements indicate that he was more concerned "to show things as they really are" than to moralize or take sides...

...His parting line as he goes off to the duel must be one of the most startling in dramatic literature: "I didn't drink any coffee today...

...The new translation by Randall Tarrell (to be published by Macmillan next year) sounded less formal than Stark Young's...

...The play may not look so closely knitted, but it will use up less wool...

...Strasberg appears to have let his actors go their various ways and then slowly pulled them into a unit...

...The play becomes, in other words, a treatise addressed to the audience on injustice—a plea...

...Tell them, so that they'll make me some . . .") Gerald Hiken would have been a definitive Andrei Prozorov—and is, to watch—if he did not keep flopping into New York intonations which clash with the careful speech of the other actors...

...This permissive technique might have led to some outstanding performances, and nearly did...

...The teamwork is admirable...

...for a spell during the first act as many as 16 actors inhabit the stage of the Morosco Theater without crowding or blurring the several scenes that go on concurrently...

...the good but ineffectual three sisters and Tusenbach lose out to the bad (in this case, practically monstrous) Natasha and Solyony...

...The heaviest acting tasks fall to Luther Adler, as Chebutykin the army doctor, and Géraldine Page as Olga...

...When lines switch direction unaccountably, the director should steer with them if their crispness, shocks, revelations, and, above all, their pace are to be preserved...

...His coordination, if sometimes studied, brings the composition into a series of interesting shapes...

...He has patiently reconstructed the play's anti-millennial world of middle-class manners...

...Jarrell has avoided those irritating inversions ("Lucky rivals I cannot have . . .") but is often less felicitous, as when somebody says, "I'm going out of my mind," or "Maybe I only look like I'm a man...

...Another danger of letting the actors behave with whole, rounded motives is that the various conflicts in the drama acquire a moral coloring...

...Questionable though it is in these particulars, the production does have a wholeness and conviction that were missing from the earlier Actors Studio offerings...

...and James Olson as Tusenbach gives substance to her equivocation over him by transposing deftly between attractiveness and helplessness...

...Perhaps we can hope that it represents a calculated point of departure and not a step forward by accident...

...they are both cool and unobtrusive in roles that are Chekhov at his most banal, giving off lines we would not take from another playwright...

...Yet affection is not enough if it fails to contend with Chekhov's matter-of-fact jumps from nonsense to pathos to bathos to whimsy, his interpolations and non-sequiturs, all those foibles that add up to a peculiarly Russian brand of humor which began with Gogol—who is quoted in the play more than once —and was taken up later by Mayakovski, Babel and Olesha...

...Strasberg has spun it out to three hours...

...A director who dwells on the melancholy goodbyes and the love scenes in Chekhov, who allows his cast "to motivate" by inserting transitions from one emotion to the next, and who generally indulges the subtext, giving it as much prominence as the actual dialogue, is being less ruthless than the author was...