Review: The Three Sisters

Longer version of a review I wrote for Show Business Weekly, appearing here by kind permission of the editor.*

The Three Sisters
by Anton Chekhov
directed by Jess Chayes
The Assembly Theatre Project
at the Red Room
85 E 4th St.

Artwork by Ethan Gould

Chekhov's The Three Sisters could be a blocking nightmare. The first two acts move between two rooms: a sitting room in the front, and a ballroom which can be seen behind the sitting room, with action often taking place in both rooms simultaneously. The Assembly Theatre Project is staging an inventive, lively, passionate Three Sisters which answers well both the demands of the play and the oddities of their performance space.

The stage at the Red Room is deeper than it is wide (really—it's like a stick of gum); there is some seating at the foot of the stage, but there are also seats disposed along its length, almost all the way to the upstage wall, interspersed here and there with prop chairs. Three television screens upstage, center, and downstage are hooked up to a hand-held video camera (video design by Edward Bauer and The Assembly). Throughout the play, the characters pick up the camera and film, zooming in on one another's faces, clowning around, handing it from person to person. Occasionally they point it at us, and we sit tense and blank, pretending to be furniture.

This device does something to leaven the dreary naturalism with which Chekhov is nearly always treated; after all, people never act less natural than when they're being filmed. It's also an elegant solution to the problem of the second room—when characters disappear into the “ballroom” (a tiny area backstage), the camera follows them, and the screens show us what's happening alongside whatever's going on in the sitting room. We can be in two places at once. The actors use the full length of the stage, striding up and down, conversing from opposite ends of a room, breaking up into little dyads and triads and clustering about tables and chairs. The staging and the television screens create multiple points of focus and intersecting lines of sight; there's always a lot to take in, but the effect is engaging and harmonious. The side chairs are probably the best seats in the house at Three Sisters, since this geometry would be more or less flattened if viewed from the “front.”

The production has other ways of involving us besides capturing us on film. As the audience trickles in, the titular three sisters are already ranged about the stage, and we must walk past them to get to our seats. Richard Foreman's Idiot Savant continued after we left; The Assembly's Three Sisters started before we got there. The play opens with the eldest sister, Olga (Kate MacCluggage), remembering how their father died exactly one year ago, leaving them a rambling house in the provinces, their out-of-place educations and each other. Irina (Emily Perkins), the youngest, is quick and vital; she is determined to work, and orders Chebutykin (Chris Hurt), the elderly army doctor who dotes on the girls, not to be her friend any longer if she grows lazy. Masha (Kate Benson), the brooding middle child, shocks everyone by wearing black and saying what's on her mind. Their brother Andrei (Ben Beckley) will soon betray them (spiritually, intellectually) by marrying the low-minded, house-proud Natasha (Alley Scott), and their only pastime is entertaining some local officers. Their get-togethers have something of the festive, unrestrained quality of an evening with the March sisters in Little Women, but we're never sure if the caustic remarks conceal deep-rooted affection, or if the affectionate gestures conceal simmering contempt. The officers, educated and well-bred, are a cut above the townsfolk, but they're also an energy drain, and they can't seem to stop declaring their love for Irina. Eventually—in six months, in a year—the sisters will tie up their loose ends in town and return to Moscow, and the present will fade a bad dream.

As Masha, Kate Benson doesn't pull any punches. She's hectic and shrill, alienating and weird. Her laughter is shocking and unprovoked. Her rhetoric flies wildly about, striking anyone who gets in its way. She's not graceful or charming: she's an intelligent woman chafing at the confines of an impossible life. There seems to always be a Masha with Chekhov; he likes to dress her all in black and marry her off to a well-intentioned but buffoonish schoolteacher. At least in Three Sisters, unlike The Seagull, Masha gets her man—the romantic, philosophizing Vershinin. As Vershinin, Levi Morger is open and appealing, a pleasure to watch every moment. Just as the sisters dream of what their life will be like in a few months, Vershinin dreams of what the human race will be like in two or three hundred years, how sublime and perfected life will be (indeed, “two or three hundred years” becomes one of the play's refrains, along with “what difference does it make?”). But he's also determined to seize happiness now, with Masha.

Seated literally in the midst of the action, at times we feel like guests at a really good party, and at others—when Andrei is teased and shamed by his sisters, or as Natasha tightens her choke hold on the family—it's almost too much to bear. We stopped being surprised by fourth-wall-violations long ago. But Three Sisters invites us in so gently, so courteously, and the production takes our involvement (and the obligations that come with it) so seriously, that we rush to meet it halfway. The second act concludes with some business about tea; we are brought tea at intermission (last Friday, the stage manager bustled out with his tray and asked, “who wants tea?” We laughed. He said, “No, seriously”). The final act takes place in an orchard; we are given dead branches to hold. This is hilarious, but it's more than superficially clever—peering at the scene through branches, we are standing in for our own voyeurism, which becomes a part of the play. In this way the stage, and the production itself, are redefined to include us and the entire theater, and it is magical. We are transformed.

*Check out some of my other reviews: Jump Jim Crow, Brecht on Brecht, The Seagull, Cross that River, Lizzie Borden

Databetes

In December, Roger Bohn and James Short of the UCSD Global Information Industry Center released their "How Much Information?" report, which measures American information consumption in 2008 (I suppose it takes a whole year to analyze the previous year's information use...). The paper makes for good reading, if only because it contains such mind-bending phrases as, “The alphabet is a very compact way to transmit words,” and “conversation is very high bandwidth,” or “reading...is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the internet.” Bohn and Short found that in 2008, Americans collectively consumed 3.6 zettabytes (a million million gigabytes) of information in sheer volume, or about 34 gigabytes per person per day, and we spent1.3 trillion hours doing it--that's 12 hours for each of us every day (read the full text here, New York Times synopsis here). Examples of “consuming information” include listening to “Car Talk,” reading The Post or a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle, checking craigslist missed connections, watching Taylor Swift music videos on youtube, playing computer games, or sobbing through “The Young Victoria” at Bay Ridge Alpine Cinemas.

It never occurred to me that I was consuming information when I did these things. Surely I was analyzing, processing, chattering about, changing what I saw, heard, and experienced—not just becoming a container for it. If all I'm really doing with nearly half my time is taking things out of the world and putting them, whole and undifferentiated, into my head—well, that suggests that the culture, other people's opinions, “facts,” have far more influence over me than the other way around.

To say that we “consume” information implies, not just eating, but joyless, compulsive eating (something like this). It reminds me of The Matrix, in which the programming flowing to the captives' minds is symbolically linked to the foul liquid forced through their feeding tubes. The report estimates that, since 1980, our consumption of information as measured in compressed bytes has increased five-fold. This increase in consumption is a function of the increased availability of information (via the internet), which is, in turn, a function of the ever plummeting price of storage. According to Bohn and Short, in 1982, the cost per megabyte for hard disk storage on a 10 megabyte drive was about $50; today it's less than $1 per gigabyte for a drive of 100 gigabytes—that's 50,000 times less expensive.

Another unit of consumption which has gotten cheaper over time is the calorie. In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan reports that since 1977, the American daily intake of calories has increased by more than 10 percent. Pollan writes that the cheapest calories to consume are also the unhealthiest. He cites a study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition which found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips and cookies, but only 250 calories worth of carrots. The same dollar can buy 875 calories of soda, but only 170 calories of fruit juice.

The question implied in the UCSD report's title is: how much information is too much information? We understand that cheap calories have hidden costs—what are the hidden costs of cheap information? Will we one day discover that, at greater and greater volumes of bytes, the brain suffers from a kind of overload, an inability to process? Could we call it databetes? Will we have to carefully ration our intake of information, the way we now ration sugar? One hour of high-resolution television gets you six hours on the couch, blindfolded, with cotton stuffed in your ears? Can you purge information by writing or talking? Unlikely, since writers and speakers generally re-read their words as they write them and listen as they speak—is that the cerebral equivalent of eating your own puke?

The report's final section discusses trends and speculates on the future of American information use. It argues that our consumption of interactive forms of information—like computer games and programs, or internet communications—has increased the most. Bohn and Short write, “Before the Internet, the only ways to have a two-way exchange without being in the same room were telephone and first-class letters.” Of course, that's not strictly true—there was plenty of variety in two-way communication before the internet. What about tapping codes, without which the 1970 classic “Knock three times” by Tony Orlando and Dawn would make absolutely no sense? After all, clunk clunk clunk means you ain't gonna show. And what about smoke signals? Semaphore? Signal mirrors? The intricate flag language employed by the British navy during the Napoleonic wars? Or the constant back-and-forth of passive aggressive pamphlets among 17th-century wits like Johnathan Swift, who would annotate one another's essays, then re-release their own polemics with annotations on their rivals' annotations?

People used to compose riddles and poems to one another. Cheaters and paramours used to go to elaborate lengths to cover their tracks; now, you just open a secret email account under the username likes2bspanked (likes2bspanked is not available. Suggest likes2bspanked101849381, or likes2bspanked101849382) and you sneak along without getting caught until the day you forget to wipe your browser's history. Craigslist and email and instant messaging have made affairs so sordid and predictable. I long to receive a cryptic valentine, whose obscure verses are themselves clues to the sender's identity.

The report notes that, “A full fidelity video link between two locations, including stereo vision and sound is not possible with present technology—the observer will realize they are not physically in the same location. If we could do it, however, it would require conservatively 100 million bits per second.” While Bohn and Short make this type of technology sound far away in the realm of speculation, they do go so far as to assign “full fidelity” a finite number—at 100 million bits per second, they estimate, we could convincingly simulate the experience of “really” being in the same room with someone. Does it then follow that at 200 million bits per second, we could create an experience more “real” than reality? Twice as real, in fact? And what would that look like? The experience of seeing a film in a theater is so immersive because the picture quality is high and the screen is enormous. At a higher picture quality (that's a higher density of information), you're less conscious of the medium between you and the images, and the larger screen tracks the boundaries of the picture, the edges that define it as separate from reality, to the peripheries of your vision. I imagine that this is one of the closest things we have to the “full fidelity” experience Bohn and Short are referring to. Trying to imagine an experience at a higher resolution—visually, auditorially, texturally—than our understanding of the unmediated world through our eyes, ears, and fingertips, is like trying to imagine a fourth dimension, the way that Carl Sagan enjoined us to in that episode of “Cosmos.” I can't think how to wrap this up, so I'm going to ask Carl to do it for me—he of the exquisitely rounded syllables.

Insensitive NY Post headline of the week (Part one of a contiuing series)

They always pun, they often rhyme, they usually insult. Every Wednesday without fail, The Farley Post Office, that beacon of reason and fair-mindedness in a world gone mad, promises to deliver the best of the worst headline writing that the New York traditional press has to offer. My all-time favorite so far ran back in August.

Madoff Dying--Unless He Can Cheat Death, Too

This week's lucky winner ran in the late edition on January 12th, above a story by Jeremy Olsham about feuding between recently widowed Tila Tequila and her late fiancee's family, who own the New York Jets.

TV Tart Tila No Jet Pet

Too soon, Olsham! TV tarts have feelings too.

Note: I may update later in the week, if The Post embarrasses itself over the tragedy in Haiti. Also, in future, I will clip the headlines and scan them, so you can get the full trashy impact of it all.

Signs we may live in a science fiction future

If you were living in a speculative fiction, you'd want to know, right? It's 2010, and the sci-fi books and films we grew up on are starting to come of age. Fritz Lang's Metropolis is set in 2026, Bladerunner in 2019. In its maiden voyage, that cumbersome and unwieldy vessel known as The Farley Post Office offers three signs that you may be living in someone's invented version of the future.

1. The Ziggurat is here.

(See: Metropolis)


In Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the outsized Gothic buildings represent a symbolic disconnect between the city's workers and the people in charge. Recently unveiled Dubai tower reveals a different kind of disconnect, like between Dubai and reality. Sure, real estate values have dropped by more than 50 %, and sure we're teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, but let's not lose sight of what's important: Dubai Tower has the world's most elevated swimming pool! If The Bible (the world's most widely read speculative fiction) has taught us anything, it's that building something really really big always precipitates an apocalypse.

2. We send robots to spy on/kill people
(See: Star Wars)


Recently I had a conversation with a friend about the unmanned aircraft the military employs openly in Iraq and Afghanistan (and the CIA covertly everywhere). She asked me what they were called, and I said, "predator drones." Later, I suffered a fit of agonized embarrassment, thinking that I must have been remembering something out of Star Wars. Surely the real-world technology had one of those cryptic military names that sound all the more sinister for being so scrupulously emptied of emotional content (like how bombs are called "ordinance"). I found later that I was right (the device pictured left, scampering on spindly metallic legs across the Ice Planet Hoth, is an Imperial Droid). Video games used to try to imitate warfare as accurately as possible; now it's the other way around. The same suite of aircraft includes the even more douchily named MQ-1 Reaper, which is capable of delivering 15 times more "ordinance" than the Predator.

3. In the future, everyone is Asian
(See: Bladerunner, The Fifth Element)

When filmmakers imagine the future, they often imagine it populated almost exclusively with Asians, hurrying down steam-filled alleys made up entirely of noodle stands and lit with red neon. I think this has less to do with the fact that the world's population is already overwhelmingly Asian (over 60%), and more to do with the glimpse that cities like Tokyo give us of the overpopulated future that is likely to become a universal reality. Get used to it, people: soon your apartment will be in your bathroom and your computerized musical bidet will also cook your breakfast.