Three Sisters images
At right you see the beds folded up, as promised.
For a lark we put labels (in Russian) on the boxed furniture. At the lower left corner here is a panel that attached to the big dining room table in ready-to-move form. It says "Use No Hooks"—well, really it's the chalked outcry of a despairing stage manager: "Never, Never Use Hooks To Lift!" Some of the other tags will be visible by and by. The spray sealant that Tom applied to the pieces made the messages rather hard to read, which was probably OK; too much of this inside-joke stuff would have detracted from the stage picture.
Three or four cast members marched in, between scenes (no curtain), to ready the furniture for the transfer. They removed and stowed certain panels, some of which are visible in the next photo, folded and mated pieces, and produced a convincing effect of a household being progressively closed down. Nice effect.
At left are the beds in, um, bed position. At the foot, the lower part of the Jugendstil tree decoration is a lauan panel that slips into grooves for this view, out of them to reveal raw plywood as in the first photo. I don't remember how the linens were modified to hide the plywood down at the floor.
Putting the mattresses on the beds was a real, pardon my Russian, suka. The extra thickness of the bezrassudnye foam pads prevented the merzavtsy from folding down correctly. It would have been better if we'd identified this problem before stapling the linens on.
Remember the grotesquely high-backed chair from the preceding page? It and its mate formed the tall packing crate you see at right. It was supposed to be a wide crate—as the "This Side Up" label tells us—but the crew got it wrong, ignoring the second "Handle With Care" label while they were at it. The vase of flowers was a late addition, courtesy of the always more than generous Gary.
On the preceding page I said I'd show you the most intricate and subtle of the transformable furniture items. You can see it at left; the outline of the dainty chair back is visible against the larger piece that used to be a vanity. Tom was very proud of this piece until he discovered the arithmetic error that kept the parts from simply slipping together. Far from "Fragile" as the label says, it required some manhandling. I don't seem to have photographed it in the deployed state.
This set really kept the cast and crew busy. The photographer, too.
The loveseat shown (without upholstery) on the preceding page had panels hinged onto the back so that it refolded into the gigantic trunk you see at right. Again with the flowers; we couldn't keep the set dressers away as we approached the end of the project.
In the last photo you see the more-or-less complete set, with fabric trees and everything. Three Sisters was visually an extremely busy show, with doctors, army officers, sisters and what seemed like the entire gentry of the guberniya—and several strongly accented servants—and the Gypsy singer-guitarist—onstage amidst the full complement of furniture waiting to be disappeared.
The show had a pretty successful run. It was the first Chekhov property that Town & Gown had tried (aside from a one-act adaptation of The Proposal for a radio variety program a couple of years ago), and definitely an encouraging tryout. I'm not qualified to say much about the translation that director John used, but to a naive theatergoer it seemed more "faithful" than stageworthy. As Richard Wilbur knows, you can do that with Molière, whose language is quite formal in the first place and whose gags work in a formal rhymed translation, but Chekhov wrote a more fluent style of dialog that the translator did not (just in my opinion) get. But this production had the great virtue that John understood the comic aspects of the script and didn't let the performances become dreary or studied.
| Previous images page | Image index |
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
 |
Images