Three Sisters (play) - Notable Productions

Notable Productions

• John Gielgud's 1936-7 landmark season at the Queen's Theatre included a well-received production with Peggy Ashcroft as Irina and Michael Redgrave as Tusenbach.
• In 1942 Judith Anderson portrayed Olga, Katharine Cornell Masha and the young Ruth Gordon Natasha on Broadway. The production was significant enough to land the cast on the cover of Time on December 21, 1942, which proclaimed it "a dream production by anybody's reckoning -- the most glittering cast the theatre has seen, commercially, in this generation."
• The 1963 inaugural season of the Guthrie Theater included a production with Jessica Tandy playing Olga.
• There is a filmed record of a mid-1960s production by The Actors Studio (much criticized for self-indulgence but mesmerizing nonetheless) with legendary stage-actresses Kim Stanley and Geraldine Page as Masha and Olga, respectively, supported by Sandy Dennis's Irina and Shelley Winters's Natasha.
• American Film Theatre in 1970 filmed a version acted by Brits, restrained but with a witty Masha from Joan Plowright opposite Alan Bates as Vershinin, with Ronald Pickup as Tusenbach and Laurence Olivier, who co-directed, playing Chebutykin.
• Rosemary Harris, Ellen Burstyn and Tovah Feldshuh played, respectively, Olga, a determinedly warm-spirited Masha and Irina in an all-star production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the 1970s with René Auberjonois in the scene-stealing role of misanthropic Solyony.
• A 1982 production at Manhattan Theatre Club, led by Dianne Wiest as Masha, had Lisa Banes as an Olga especially fond of Vershinin, Mia Dillon as Irina, Christine Ebersole as Natasha, Sam Waterston as Vershinin, Jeff Daniels as an endearingly oafish Andrei, Bob Balaban as Tusenbach, and the veteran comic actor Jack Gilford as Chebutykin.
• Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company put one together under the direction of Austin Pendleton (himself a much-praised Tusenbach in the Ellen Burstyn production), with Molly Regan's briskly efficient Olga, Joan Allen's inward-drawn Masha, Rondi Reed's slatternly Natasha, and Kevin Anderson as a Solyony who came close to forcing himself physically on Irina at the close of Act Two.
• The Roundabout Theatre in New York brought together an odd assortment of stars for a production that had Jerry Stiller's desperately frustrated Chebutykin, a handsome Solyony in Billy Crudup, indie-film actress Lili Taylor a rather depressed Irina, Paul Giamatti well-cast and touching as Andrei, Amy Irving as Olga, movie-star-pretty Jeanne Tripplehorn as Masha, the witty, sylph-like Natasha of Calista Flockhart, just before she became a television star with Ally McBeal, and a great, sad hero of a Vershinin in David Strathairn.
• In 1991, Vanessa Redgrave (Olga) and Lynn Redgrave (Masha) made their first and only appearance together onstage in this, with niece Jemma Redgrave as Irina.
• A 2010 production at the Lyric Hammersmith by Filter had a cast including Poppy Miller, Romola Garai and Clare Dunne
• In 2011 it was adapted by Blake Morrison for Northern Broadsides under the title We Are Three Sisters, drawing out parallels with the lives of the Brontë sisters.
• In 2012 it was staged at the Young Vic, directed by Benedict Andrews in his own new version. The cast included Vanessa Kirby, Mariah Gale and Sam Troughton.