Chekhov performance thrills audience

When you attend a show at the Pear Avenue Theatre, it’s likely you will enjoy a performance as good as you will see anywhere. That’s because many of the best of the Bay Area performers are drawn to this 5 year-old 40-seat enterprise that specializes in the best of the theatrical literature, irrespective of commercial viability.

And, a chance to perform in the "Three Sisters,” by Anton Chekhov, is just the sort of classic work to which serious performers flock.

As a result, director Jeanie Forte was able to gather together one of the best casts in memory. Forte herself is an accomplished, insightful and sensitive director and with these well cast actors, and another period-inspired set by Ron Gasparinetti, this sizes up to be a memorable performance.

The three sisters are from the Prozorov family, raised along with their brother, in comfortable circumstances in Moscow, as children of a military father, whose death, along with their mother, brings them now to live in a small "nowhere” town in the countryside.

Olga (Meredith Hagedorn) is the eldest, a spinster, and the inheritor of the "mother of the family” role.

Masha (Elizabeth Coy) is the most beautiful of the three, but full of ennui from her marriage at age 18 to a much older Fyodor Kulygin (John Baldwin), a high school teacher who is boring, self-centered, somewhat pompous, but an eternally loving and forgiving husband.

What Kulygin needs to forgive is her affair with the local military commandant Alexander Vershinin (Andrew Harkins), complicated by his being married and with two children.

The youngest is Irina (Sarah Cook), eternally yearning to return to her happier days in Moscow, even as she is fending off the marriage proposals of another military officer, Baron Nikolay Tusenbakh (Rob Dario).

In the European fashion of the day, sisters defer to and protect brothers and Andrey (Thom Gorrebeeck), needs much of that when he marries the scheming, more common Natasha (Shannon Stowe), who sets about to take control over the household.

A 60-year-old army doctor Ivan Chebutykin (John Hutchinson), is a close family friend, and a cynical onlooker and belittler of the importance of the typical human foibles that assail this family, as only Chekhov’s great human insights can record in a few hours, and are the typical dynamics of most upper class families, everywhere.

David Hamilton is excellent as Captain Vasily Solyony, a sarcastic pain-in-the-butt guest in the house along with his fellow officer Baron Tusenbakh.

Jim Johnson is an actor who brings unique nuances to each minor character role he undertakes and, as Ferapont, the town’s District Council watchman, he brings great relief comedy at sorely needed times.

Lynda Marcum is perfect as Anfisa, the aging family servant, fearful of being thrown out into the cold world as she becomes less useful. This is a far-looking and perceptive play, set in about 1900, where Chekhov foresees the decay of Russia’s privileged classes that are eventually completely terminated by the Russia’s Revolution 18 years later.

Also, in true Russian introspective tradition, Chekhov blends in the kind of philosophical musing that only the upper classes had the education and time in which to engage.

But that doesn’t in one whit diminish the enjoyment of a great theatrical work, constructed by one of the world’s greatest playwrights, in a very approachable modern translation by Craig Lucas.