Bending Chekhov’s Boundaries

The Prozorov family’s dream of returning to Moscow is as hopeless as ever in “Un Hombre que se Ahoga,” Daniel Veronese’s daring reimagining of “The Three Sisters.” But this time, they’re going nowhere fast.Mr. Veronese, whose Argentine company Proyecto Chejov wraps up a three-night stint at the Lincoln Center Festival tonight, packs all four acts of Chekhov’s 1900 masterpiece into less than 90 minutes, but his defiantly unadorned production leaves plenty of room for good old-fashioned Russian melancholy. The 11 stultifying years spent in this provincial outpost show on every whisker in Olga’s salt-and-pepper beard, while Masha’s mustache droops listlessly from a marriage to …Hang on a second. Salt-and-pepper beard? Mustache? Is this some campy assault on the tragicomic pieties of Chekhov? A yuk-it-up “Three Brothers”? Not really. Once the premise clicks into place and the giggles die down, “Un Hombre que se Ahoga” (translated as “A Man Who Drowns”) remains true to Chekhov in its fashion. While the production style — no lighting cues, only diegetic music, a modern-day setting — hearkens to the austere Dogme ethos of filmmaking, Mr. Veronese takes a fundamentally absurd notion and presents it unabashedly until the audience signs on. Even when the attempt falls short, the 12-member cast is unified in its poised, markedly low-key approach.As with the casting of a white Othello, a gender swap involving major roles like these can raise hackles. With the canon skewed so heavily toward men as it is, beleaguered actresses would be excused for griping, “Sheesh, don’t they have enough already? Can we at least do an ‘Aunt Vanya’?”In this world, however, all of the characters have swapped genders, not just the central ones. And so the military battery stationed in the town, complete with several soldiers pining away for the youngest Prozorov, Irina (Claudio Tolcachir), is made up entirely of women, and the hapless older brother, Andrei, is played by the wonderful Gabriela Ferrero.This results in the occasional logistical snafu, as when Andrei’s wife, the hateful arriviste Natasha (Pablo Messiez), is forced to conceal her pregnancy. (One side benefit is that Natasha, easily the vilest individual in all of Chekhov, receives a good number of satisfying slaps that would be verboten were a woman playing the role.) But it also offers an intriguing spin on the languor that engulfs Olga (an affecting Claudio Da Passano), Masha (Luciano Suardi), and Irina, conveyed through restless flashes of violence, as well as on the methods of seduction employed by Irina’s various suitors.The deeper concern stems from Mr. Veronese’s aggressively modern performance style. When the dissolute, nihilistic doctor Chebutykin (Marta Lubos) invokes Chekhov’s name as a virtual contemporary of Shakespeare’s, the message is clear: That was then, this is now. But while scraping off the accretions of decorum that have grown on “The Three Sisters” is a welcome mission, Proyecto Chejov occasionally chisels beyond the tea settings and into the marrow.Mr. Veronese’s chronological elisions — several months elapse as Natasha jumps onto Andrei, catapulting the action to Act II — are likely to confuse those not familiar with the text. And with characters routinely muttering and interrupting one another Method-style, Chekhov’s lofty syntax comes in for ridicule throughout “Hombre.” (Sylvia Bofill’s English translations, projected as supertitles, remain fairly faithful to the original text.)The nobler sentiments that symbolize the privileged class’s increasingly tenuous grip on respectability become laughably archaic here; Mr. Veronese accents this disconnect by having Vershinin (Malena Figó), Masha’s romantic interest, twist his neck and gaze meaningfully into the distance whenever he delivers his desperate declarations of optimism for society.Still, maybe laughable isn’t altogether inappropriate. Maybe the unavoidable goofiness that comes with a mustachioed Masha nudges Chekhov closer to the blend of mirth and misery that the playwright famously sought, a blend that has bedeviled directors from the very beginning. Chekhov stormed out of the first reading of “The Three Sisters,” Stanislavsky wrote, because “he had written a happy comedy and all of us … wept over it.” Perhaps the problem, “Un Hombre que se Ahoga” suggests, lay in the casting.Until July 19 (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500).

Bending Chekhov’s Boundaries

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