Three Sisters (TCG Edition). Anton Chekhov

hope, too, that this text may help American actors and directors of the play to move away from the “Russianness” of Three Sisters, and toward its universal humanity. It had always seemed to me there must have been in 1900 women living in Nebraska, let’s say, who longed to go back to Boston where they’d been born and brought up. That connection is lost, or somehow trivialized, whenever I see an American actress done up as a Russian peasant shuffle across the stage carrying a samovar. In Chekhov’s time a samovar was as ordinary an item of domestic life as a television is today. To bring one onstage, fraught with symbolism and “Russianness,” is to miss the point and lose the focus of the play. The quaintness of it goes against everything Chekhov as a dramatist was striving for.

      I have included some notes to the text; I hope they help to make things clear for the performers. This text is intended for those I admire as much as Chekhov did: people who make theatre because they love it.

      —Paul Schmidt

       New York

       April, 1992

Three Sisters

      CHARACTERS

      Andréi Prózorov.

      Natásha, his fiancée, later his wife.

      Kulýgin, Másha’s husband, a high school teacher.

      Vershínin, colonel, battery commander.

      Baron Túzenbach, first lieutenant.

      Solyóny, captain.

      Chebutýkin, army doctor.

      Fedótik, second lieutenant.

      Róhde, second lieutenant.

      Ferapónt, janitor at the County Council, an old man.

      Anfísa, the Prozorovs’ eighty-year-old nurse.