Ben Yoganathan, Hallie Seline, Shauna Thompson and Caroline Toal in Three Sisters.DAHLIA KATZ/Howland and Company Theatre
- Title: Three Sisters
- Adapted and directed by: Paolo Santalucia
- Actors: Shauna Thompson, Caroline Toal, Hallie Seline, Christine Horne
- Company: Howland Company and Hart House Theatre
- Venue: Hart House Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: To Nov. 12, 2022
Let’s focus on one of the sisters first.
Masha, the most mesmerizing middle child in dramatic literature, is played by Caroline Toal – an indie actor with impressive range – in the contemporary adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters now on in Toronto. This new version is a co-production between the Howland Company and Hart House Theatre.
Toal gives as fine as a performance as you’ll see of this twentysomething character, who was charmed by and married a guy named Theo (Dan Mousseau) and too late discovered he’s a fool.
From the first scene, where Masha simply tries to read a book while her older sister, Olga (Hallie Seline), and younger sister, Irina (Shauna Thompson), chatter around her, Toal is a fascinating, oscillating presence on stage, swinging from frustration to fervour and back again. Her Masha is constantly physically shrinking away from attention (and her husband’s embrace), and yet can’t help but attract the audience’s interest with the life vibrating just under her surface.
Masha only gets to let that light out in her affair with Alex, a colonel stationed at a military base nearby (played here, as a woman, by Christine Horne). Toal portrays the first flutters of infatuation in such an infectious way that you, watching, feel as if you are in falling in love as well. Her devastation when their affair comes to an inevitable ending is heartbreaking – and I found myself unexpectedly moved to tears along with her.
Why unexpectedly? Well, so much else about this Three Sisters – a co-production between the Howland Company and Hart House Theatre – is as frustrating and unfulfilling as the sisters’ circumstances.
Director Paolo Santalucia‘s production of his own adaptation is bogged down by an unwieldy design, inconsistent performances and an overall atmosphere that just doesn’t gel.
His version is set in some remote rural corner of Canada, though the three adult orphan sisters at the centre of the action – whom the plot follows through several bleak years of courtship, affairs or lovelessness – only speak in oblique terms about the city they long ago left behind. There’s no attempt to find a precise Canadian corollary for Moscow.
The time is now-ish in the look and costuming of the parade of bad or weak men and eccentric hangers-on that pass through the home where the sisters grew up – here bequeathed entirely to their one bad-with-money brother, Andrei (Ben Yoganathan). Andrei’s wife, Natasha (appropriately annoying in Ruth Goodwin’s portrayal), checks on her baby through a monitor app on a smartphone.
At the same time, however, this is a world where samovars are given as gifts, written messages are sometimes passed on by hand by housekeeper (Kyra Harper) and duelling is apparently still a thing. The language of Santalucia’s adaptation is a mishmash, too, profanity and colloquial contemporary filler words such as “like” bumping up against oddly formal or dated expressions and minimonologues.
Nancy Anne Perrin’s set is a split-level one – suggesting that this production’s two-places-at-once feel is intentional. But, in execution, too much comes off as a clash – the hyper-realism of a dinner scene staged around a too small table, for instance, looking weird in front of an expressionistically lit scrim and a backdrop of symbolic hanging windows. (There are moments that are just off with the direction, too, such as when a group of actors suddenly started mouthing words instead of speaking them.)
The Howland Company, which is collectively led, had made a name for itself as an indie company that does big ensemble shows.DAHLIA KATZ/Howland and Company Theatre
Seeing this production so close on the heels of the exceptional Uncle Vanya by Crow’s Theatre (a frequent Howland Company partner), it’s certainly clear how tuned in to our times Chekhov’s writing is as our own world seems to teeter on the edge of something new, unknown and scary. The palpable fear about deteriorating economic circumstances. Those imperfect idealists who speak beautifully about the natural environment and who have 100-year visions of the future, contrasted with short-sighted, selfish characters who can’t wait to chop trees down. Privileged people who moved to the country – and now can’t afford to move back to the city.
Indeed, the Russian writer’s major plays are so much in sync with the present that updating them can, paradoxically, distance an audience. Masha’s plotline stands out not just because of the fine performances of Toal and Horne, but because the stakes of what’s going on in her life register with a weight that Olga’s spinsterdom (in her early 30s) and Irina’s lack of strong choices in a suitor (in her mid-20s) can’t in a contemporary context. There’s too much sobbing or rage that only comes across as whiny or tiresome – which there is a little of in Chekhov, of course, but can’t take over.
The Howland Company, which is collectively led, had made a name for itself as an indie company that does big ensemble shows, whether classics such as Casimir and Caroline or contemporary work such as The Wolves. Maybe there are some growing pains in this leap to a 450-seat, proscenium stage from those previous black-box, up-close projects that felt so cohesive.