To San Francisco, and Nowhere: TACIT’s Incorrigible Three Sisters

The production’s immediate triumph is visual: a gorgeous, impressionistic mountain range splashed across a collage of canvases, less backdrop than psychic weather. It made the high-desert setting feel both immense and airless, a place with too much sky and not enough future. Against this landscape, the Prozorovs’ house became a holding pen for thwarted intelligence: three sisters, altogether incorrigible in their struggle against mediocrity and patriarchal asphyxiation, dreaming not of Moscow but of San Francisco — the “Golden City” inflated into a secular heaven, replete with fog, culture, and escape.

TACIT’s Three Sisters, directed by Brian Brophy and staged in Ramo Auditorium April 23-26, relocates Chekhov’s aching provincial limbo to a 1950s high-desert military town in Southern California, in which San Francisco — subbing for Moscow — is more than a destination, but a fantasy of class, infrastructure, and urban salvation. The transposition works because it understands that the Prozorovs’ longing is less geographic than existential. “To San Francisco,” echoing Chekhov’s “To Moscow,” becomes a prayer, a joke, a diagnosis.

The cast, from left to right: Sullivan Braun as Lt. Nicholas Baron (Baron Tuzenbach), Jacob Buligan as Andrew Prozorov (Andrei), Sarah Gates as Natasha, Prof. Michael Vanier as Dr. John Chamberlain (Ivan Chebutykin), Ellis Spickermann as Irene (Irina), Marcin Kurowski as Lt. Col. Alexander Vershinin, Julie Belville as Masha, Dima Burov as Theodore Culligan (Fyodor Kulygin), Rémy Morgan as Olga, Michael Gutierrez as Cpt. Sully Sullivan (Vassily Solyony), and Therese Bagsit as Anita (Anfisa). (Credit: Brian Brophy)

Our three sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, are not merely wistful; they are resistant. Their yearning for San Francisco is partly snobbery, partly grief, partly self-preservation. The precarity of staging this play is that its longing can become decorative. Here, the sisters’ longing is active, abrasive—a refusal to accept the smallness assigned to them by marriage, work, family, provincial life, and men who “philosophize” while women endure.

Masha, played by Julie Belville (APh G4), anchors the play’s edge: a woman whose intelligence has soured into irony, but not yet into resignation. Irene, played by Ellis Spickermann (MS G4), makes the sisters’ most sinuous arc — luminous idealism toward exhausted compromise. JPLer Rémy Morgan’s Olga, meanwhile, must carry the tragedy of competence: the person everyone relies upon precisely because her own life has been quietly confiscated. Together, the sisters should feel not like three versions of the same complaint, but three distinct responses to the same suffocation.

The surrounding men are well-calibrated to Chekhov’s special taxonomy of male insufficiency. Andrew, played with measured timidity by PCC’s Jacob Buligan, is specially self-destructive: not a broad comic failure, but a man shrinking in real time, apologizing his way out of his own future. Alexander Vershinin (Marcin Kurowski) brings the glamour of the elsewhere, Nicholas Baron (Sullivan Braun) the sincerity of hopeful labor, Theodore Culligan (Dima Burov) the oppressing niceness of dull marriage, and Sully Sullivan (Michael Gutierrez) the more abrasive threat of masculine insecurity disguised as irreverence. The key is that none of them are played as merely ridiculous; their ridiculousness matters because it has consequences for the women around them.

Vershinin, Olga, Baron, and Sullivan watch a pontificating Masha. (Credit: Brian Brophy)

Natasha, played by Sarah Gates (Ph G1), may be the production’s stealth weapon. Her villainy is most frightening when it is procedural rather than theatrical. She does not need to announce herself as an antagonist; she only needs to correct, rearrange, assign rooms, invoke the baby, manage the household, and slowly make everyone else feel like a guest in their own life. Hardly outside the world of the play, she is that world — learning, scene by scene, how to speak in commands.

The adaptation’s 1950s texture (television, popular songs, cocktail chatter, high-desert military culture) risks over-brightening Chekhov if handled too jauntily. If such a staging let those details curdle, they could be devastating. Fortunately, the music and period business didn’t just decorate the action: TACIT leveraged this setting to lay bare the characters’ desperation while keeping things moving, funny, social, and bearable while the house was lost around them.

Last April saw a Three Sisters with a persuasive local intelligence: funny without being weightless, visually expansive without being liberating, and alive to the way disappointment becomes social atmosphere. As TACIT’s production demonstrated, the sisters are not passive emblems of melancholy. They are bright, difficult, trapped people trying to preserve a sense of scale in a world determined to make them smaller.

The play was made possible thanks to the hard work of the crew: producer Laura Flower Kim, stage manager Taryne Moyse, visual strategist David Delgado, costume designer Linda Muggeridge, lighting designer Finn Swanson, graphic designer and marketer Cole Remmen, and assistant stage manager Alicia Trevino, with Edvar Bautista on the soundboard. Thank you all for keeping Caltech theater alive!