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A Side of
by Michael Bettencourt
Three Sisters Come and Go reviewed May 14, 2010
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| L-R: Claire Helene, Liza Cassidy, Jackie Lowe |
| Photo Credit:Enrico Luttman |
| According to an explanatory note included in the press kit, Three Sisters Come And Go "investigates the relationship between loss and desire, and the creative process as a path to joy" by using French philosopher Julia Kristeva's notion that "artistic creation provides a sublime means beyond melancholia." This melancholia, according to Kristeva in such works of hers as Black Sun, is caused by an "intrinsic crisis of representation [where] our symbolic means are hollow, paralyzed such that we are compelled to be silent."
To give this airy claim a theatrical weight, director/dramaturg Orietta Crispino has stitched together Samuel Beckett's dramaticule Come and Go with scenes drawn from Anton Chekov's four major plays to see, according to the note, if it is "possible to speak to the contemporary loss of meaning and somehow, through the art of acting, find a new vision of being." However, too often this otherwise technically competent production keeps the audience in its head and away from its heart and thus lacks the kind of dramatic velocity and emotional openness that might spark this sought-after "new being" into life.
Ms. Crispino has set this production in a stark white cube of a room, where even the 30 chairs holding the audience are white. Viewers are separated from actors by a proscenium which has a black curtain opened and closed by a stagehand placed house left up on a small loft platform. The color scheme (for at least the Chekov parts) reiterates this black/white divide, with the occasional red table napkins and swagged side-curtains throwing in a dash of color.
The performance begins with Come and Go, all 121 words of it, as the three actors, following the precise choreography designed by Beckett, establish the typical Beckett-world of dislocating sadness leavened by just the tiniest possibility of attraction and connection. Ms. Crispino uses the Beckett to establish the melancholia that is the starting point of the "path to joy" that the rest of the 70-minute production will travel through the deployment of the scenes from Chekov.
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| L-R: Claire Helene, Liza Cassidy, Jackie Lowe |
| Photo Credit:Enrico Luttman |
| It is not clear to me what Three Sisters Come And Go achieves at the end of its appointed round, if it achieves a "new vision of being" by the curtain call. The whole production had, for me, the feel of a set of acting exercises, competently carried out by Liza Cassidy, Claire Helene, and Jackie Lowe, yet without the actors necessarily knowing the meaning of either their lines or the end-game of their activities -- which is odd, given that the three actors are listed as collaborators on the script.
For one example among many, Ms. Helene has an extended direct-address monologue late in the production that she delivers with the black curtains behind her closed. (In the script it is titled "The New Me - Solo.") During this performance, she carries on about her unhappiness with life. At one point she goes through the curtains and returns with two wine glasses and a white carafe of wine; one glass she fills and hands to an audience member, the second she keeps for herself. Then more travail, about not being a writer and being full of anger, which even propels her to take a seat among the audience as she laments. Eventually, she wills herself to stop crying, sustains that, and leaves the stage.
Never once during this rendition did I feel convinced or moved by anything "The New Me" had to say -- not because Ms. Helene lacked the skills but because it betrayed its structural joints at every step. Or, more accurately, the overarching Kristeva-conceit so strait-jacketed the script that Ms. Helene never had a real chance to make the words and actions work to her advantage. Nothing about it felt organic or logical or cumulative; it did not feel like it had a heart.
Many don't mind this kind of meta-theater, where the production is also a comment upon itself as well as upon the making of theater, where disbelief is embraced rather than suspended, and this is the intellectual geography where Ms. Crispino had chosen to place Three Sisters Come And Go. Each audience member will have to decide if the production "speak[s] to the contemporary loss of meaning and somehow, through the art of acting, find[s] a new vision of being." It did not do this for me. It may very well do it for others.
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Theaterlab
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Category: Experimental
Written by: Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett & Julia Kristeva
Directed by: Orietta Crispino
Produced by: Theaterlab
Opened: May 12, 2010
Closed: May 27, 2010
Running Time: 70 minutes
Theater: Theaterlab
Address: 137 West 14th Street, 2nd floor (between 6th and 7th Avenues)
New York, NY 10011
Yahoo! Maps Directions
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Tickets: $20.00
Pay-What-You-Can for Monday performances
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Creative Team
Directed by: Orietta Crispino
Dramaturgy by: Orietta Crispino and Marco Casazza
Costumes by: Sara Baldocchi-Byrne
Cast
Liza Cassidy
Claire Helene
Jackie Lowe
Crew
Assistant Director: Marco Casazza
Stage Manager: Dahee Kim
Set Construction: Taylor Ruckel
Lighting Technician: Drew Vanderburg
Tech Assistance: Jason Howard
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