REALITY THEATRE.('Brace Up!, St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn, New York, New York)(Theater Review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 10-MAR-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Could be Melikhovo, could be anywhere. The three sisters--Olga, Masha, and Irina--live with their brother, Andrei, in the provincial town where their father, a military man, was stationed, or retired, before he died, far from the family's former glory in Moscow. Here the siblings dream and dream, but none of them know where to direct their longings. Toward Moscow? Their dead father? It's all the same. Olga, a schoolteacher plagued by migraines, droops with refinement like a fat rose. Masha, trapped in an unhappy marriage, is a conundrum of belief and despair. Irina, an optimist who hoped that work, useful work, would be the cure for her malaise, becomes as tired of her own philosophy as she is of the dead-end job she secures. Andrei thwarts his sisters' hopes of rescue by failing to get a professorship in Moscow, and settles instead for a job as a provincial bureaucrat, which falls more in line with the petty ambitions of his wife, Natalya. The siblings have been in this town for eleven years, and nothing has changed. Moscow looms. Flowers bloom. Then it's autumn again, another winter, and still nothing happens. The heart breaks with hope and boredom.

As a drama--or a comedy, as Chekhov preferred to...

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