Three Sisters at The Howland Company
Photo by Dahlia Katz
Visually, The Howland Company and Hart House Theatre’s Three Sisters is very bright. And while the characters speak in firmly contemporary language, Nancy Anne Perrin’s pastel-coloured set invokes a distinct brand of twentieth century white picket fence optimism.
Fair game: the titular sisters — Olga (Hallie Seline), Masha (Caroline Toal), and Irina (Shauna Thompson) — miss “the city”, and are tired of living in their deceased father’s home. So the house is the physical manifestation of the past they wish to escape from; it makes sense that it feels old.
Upstage, there is a cyc, which provides a glowing wall of light. This too feels ironic, often taking on the blue and white of a hyperbolically picturesque blue sky and further contributing to the image of a too-perfect suburbia. These sisters are trapped not only by the house, but by the environment that surrounds it.
Hart House Theatre, where Three Sisters is performed, is a large, distancing theatre. I am always aware of the institutional architecture that surrounds me when I’m watching a show there. The set of Three Sisters pushes this distancing effect further, because it is very high up: a large wooden floor bottoms the set, raising the primary playing space about a foot above the already high stage. And on stage left, there are stairs leading to an even higher section of stage. So there’s quite a distance between the audience and the actors. But as much as Three Sisters is about numbness, all this distancing is fairly productive. The sisters are far away from home, and we are, physically, far away from the show.
Sometimes, though, the show tries to move us instead of distance us, and the actors have to work hard to facilitate that shift. The Howland Company has consistently been one of the most grounded and present ensembles of actors in the city, and they continue that work here: their obviously contemporary body language and commitment to being in the moment come back to ground the piece whenever it threatens to be consumed by the blue void shining behind it.
It’s great just watching the 13-person cast occupy space in that beautiful theatre. Especially since it’s so intergenerational: it’s lovely, and appropriate to the play’s setting, to see Ben Yoganathan and Steven Hao — recent TMU grads who’ve been in a wide array of shows across the city this year — share the stage with vets like Robert Persichini.
In a city packed with new one act plays starring 1-3 people, Three Sisters — a large-scale production of a text from the year 1900 — is unique, and certainly worth checking out before it closes on Sunday.