Arts Orbit

Any local production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters can be considered a site-specific production, if you consider the state of Minnesota a site. The characters are bound to their town by family, friends, and property. Some are content with their lot, and others long to escape, but all are defined by the limitations imposed on them by their distance from the metropolis. If only they could go to New York—er, Moscow—their problems would be solved. Or not.

It was a cool but humid spring evening on May 4, and the eerie sunlight was still fading as Nightpath Theatre’s production of The Three Sisters began at Walker Community Church. It was apt that the church’s windows were open to the budding summer and dying day, a moment that captured the vertigo with which Chekhov’s characters struggle. Irina, a character who emerges as central in this production, is a young woman with her life ahead of her, but she’s resigned to let her fate fall down upon her like the steel trap that’s already encased her older sisters Olga and Masha.

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