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Another sign: becoming an adjective.
Chekhov passes both tests. The Chekhovian style — a smoothie of sympathy, misanthropy, hopelessness and bemusement — is highly prized today. Playwrights try to acquire it the way grave robbers tried to acquire saints’ fingers: by theft.
At least the theft is generally acknowledged, as if to say: We’re stealing from the best. Post-Chekhov plays like “Minor Character,” “Life Sucks,” “Drowning Crow,” “Stupid _____ Bird” and “The Wisteria Trees,” among many others, do not hide their debt to “Uncle Vanya,” “The Seagull” and “The Cherry Orchard” — they advertise it.
Likewise, Halley Feiffer’s “Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow,” which opened Thursday at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space in Hell’s Kitchen, states up front that it is an adaptation of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.”
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And yet that’s a dodge. This amusing stunt of a play, commissioned by the Williamstown Theater Festival and directed by Trip Cullman, isn’t so much adapted as lifted intact, then sliced, colorized and confettied. It’s Chekhov’s skeleton given a “Mean Girls” makeover.
That skeleton is almost exactly what it was when “Three Sisters” debuted in 1901. Olga, Masha and Irina Prozorov, though raised in Moscow, have landed in a provincial Russian backwater where nothing much happens except heartbreak. At 28, the hard-as-nails Olga (Rebecca Henderson) already fears becoming a spinster; at 25, the dramatic Masha (Chris Perfetti) feels trapped in a dead-end marriage; and though just turning 20 as the play begins, the dewy Irina (Tavi Gevinson) worries that she is incapable of love. Time and a series of challenges will prove them all sadly right.
But even within the familiar (if aggressively trimmed) story, Feiffer manages a major transformation. Turning the sisters inside out, she skins them of the social graces that make them sympathetic in the original. They are no longer young women of culture and refinement struggling to resist despair but premature harridans unable to shut up about it, in language too coarse for company.
“I can’t even masturbate anymore,” Olga tells her sisters, not so Chekhovianly.
The disjuncture is of course deliberate; Feiffer has said she wrote the play thinking it would be “fun and funny” to translate Chekhov into “millennial speak.” Olga, reminding Irina that her birthday is also the anniversary of their father’s death, commiserates insincerely by speaking in emoticons. (“Sad face,” she says, barely bothering to make one.) When their brother, Andrey, asks the social-climbing neighbor Natasha to marry him, she answers with snark and upspeak, “Obvi.”
This is funny, yes, at least in small doses; Feiffer has a joke plugger’s ear for deflation and wordplay. Irina, rhapsodizing that she feels like a boat — “the sky above me, the sea below” — is quickly cut down by Olga, who says, “Yeah, we know how boats work.” Andrey (Greg Hildreth) isn’t just bored and lonely, he’s “blonely.”
But the absurdity and sarcasm quickly pall; Feiffer evidently wants the audience to experience the household’s emotional depletion firsthand. (She says she sextupled the title for maximum annoyance.) Seated on two sides of a narrow platform cluttered with detritus from various decades between 1900 and now, theatergoers can’t help but feel they are trapped along with the Prozorovs in an eternal (or at least a 95-minute) headache.
Anachronism and anomie are the keynotes of Cullman’s inventive production. That platform set, by Mark Wendland, is lit by Ben Stanton with soft Chinese lanterns and harsh fluorescents; the costumes, by Paloma Young, are winkingly contemporary, with lacy yoga pants for the arriviste Natasha (Sas Goldberg) and Playbill pajamas for Masha’s apparently closeted husband, Kulygin (Ryan Spahn). The soundscape samples Whitney Houston, Russian rap and “Into the Woods.”
This aesthetic discipline supports Feiffer’s tone at every turn. Cullman makes even the scene changes comply, so that the fire occurring during what was once the break between Act 2 and Act 3 is now a staged “fire,” all garish red lights and choreographed chaos.
With most of the play’s events in quotation marks, you’d think there would be nothing left for the characters to do but mouth their lines. Yet Feiffer, here as in “The Pain of My Belligerence” and “I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard,” manages to leave room for piquant acting within her overwrought concepts.
In “Moscow,” which is gorgeously and nontraditionally cast, real feeling does push through the sarcasm from time to time. Masha’s desperate passion for the soldier Vershinin (Alfredo Narciso) is made in no way ridiculous by the fact that Perfetti is plainly a man in a dress. The paternal love that the doctor, Chebutykin, feels for Irina is no less touching now that the text spells out what used to be subtext; Ray Anthony Thomas nails it beautifully anyway.
I was especially taken by the way Goldberg as Natasha and Matthew Jeffers as the “freak” soldier Solyony do justice to their characters’ repellency while also suggesting its causes. Jeffers especially shows us, in a kind of preview of incel culture, that the moral idleness and emotional obtuseness of the highborn Prozorovs reverberates disastrously beyond their privileged household.
But all of this real feeling is Chekhov’s; the cast might just as creditably have performed the original “Three Sisters.” Despite her skill and wit, I’m not sure what Feiffer has added to it, even as it’s clear what she has subtracted. Masha, the idlest sister, encapsulates the nihilism of the adaptation’s ethos when she says, “That’s what life is, I think? Just doing horrible things? And complaining about them?”
As a dramatist, Chekhov wasn’t nihilistic. For him, the struggle against despair was endlessly engaging even though despair itself was not. Despite a tacked-on semi-happy ending, “Moscow” flips those polarities, reveling in hatefulness and hopelessness. That may be timely but, as Chekhov never said, it’s also a bit too obvi.
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“Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow” runs through Aug. 3 at the Susan and Ronald Frankel Theater at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, Manhattan; 646-506-9393, mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.