Rediscovering Chekhov’s Plays in the Pandemic

“Let’s go to Moscow; I beg you, please!”

Alone on the bathroom floor, I whispered lines of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. The script felt precious in my hands; I hadn’t touched it in years. I said the words over and over, an incantation: “To Moscow!” But I had been in this play before, I had played this part. And I knew—no one gets to Moscow.

There were no stage lights now, no heavy skirts or petticoats: only timeworn bath towels, my daughter’s discarded pajama shirt, the dying plant on the windowsill, the wail of sirens in the city beyond. Hugging my knees to my chest, I sat on the floor in my husband’s sweater, the one I had been wearing for three days, my unwashed hair falling about my shoulders.

As the early days of the coronavirus pandemic gave way to weeks and then to months, I sometimes retreated to the small patch of floor in our bathroom. It was the only place I found solitude, isolating as I was in a tiny Brooklyn apartment with my spouse, our children, and two cats. The monotony of our days had become difficult to bear. I turned thirty-three that summer, but felt something past age. I felt like a ghost, and had come to love the shock of the cold tile on the back of my legs, reminding me I was alive. Lonely as I was, with a pervasive boredom bordering on existential dread, I felt as though I were living in a Russian play.

Ten years had passed since I first played the role of Irina, one of the three titular sisters—ten years since the longing for Moscow was mine to call out every night into a cavernous theater. In the play, the sisters dream of leaving provincial Russia and returning to the Moscow of their youth, where they believe their lives will finally begin. They wouldn’t mind the poor weather, they say, if only they were in Moscow. If they could just get there, they think, all their hopes for life might at last be fulfilled.

I ran my finger along the pale yellow highlights where I’d once marked my lines. Moscow. The word in my mouth rendered my body nearly limp with hunger. I covered my face with my hands, humiliated even in my solitude by what that word had the power to do to me, filling me so suddenly with yearning. I longed for Manhattan the way Irina longed for Moscow—the city itself, but also the bright place it occupied in my young adulthood. Manhattan was just beyond the river, just there, but so terribly far. The sense that life was passing me by consumed me as the tedious confinement of the pandemic wore on. I was beginning to make sense of Irina’s desperation, her belief that she might find meaning and passion if only she could get back to the city she remembers. Ten years earlier, when the role was mine, I hadn’t understood at all.

*

At the beginning of 2011, in an especially snow-filled winter, I was twenty-three and earning a master’s degree in acting in New York City. I’d been cast in an adaptation and simultaneous staging of the four major plays of Anton Chekhov: The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. The production came to be known in my mind and nowhere else as Chekhov Spectacular!

Rehearsal was rapture—the T-shirts paired with long, black rehearsal skirts, the abandoned cups of cold coffee that littered the studios. But my greatest joy was spending my school days alongside people I loved, show after show, for years on end. We became exceptionally close as we lived so many different lives together—playing lovers, rivals, and families, reveling in each other’s company both onstage and off. Siri, who played my older sister Olga, would pull me close to her at the play’s end, holding my body as I shook, the sound of the gunshot killing my stage-fiancé echoing through the theater. When the snow cradle above us in the rafters settled after curtain call, she’d carefully brush the small plastic flakes from my blouse.

There was Jacob, too, who played Uncle Vanya in our Chekhov Pageant. Jacob and I lived in the same apartment building and rode the subway together to class, leaning into one another in the early mornings on the uptown 2 train, running together through the West Village so as not to be late. Once, in a moment of despair over something now inconsequential, Jacob comforted me in the hallway while I cried. He smoothed my hair. I loved him, my dear friend. We were hopeful and young. Our dreams were ambitious.

On Tuesday mornings, the beautiful opera singer Dr. Christopher Roselli sat atop a folding table and taught me how to voice Irina’s longing, calling “Moscow, Moscow, Moscow” into the small rehearsal studio. I felt the brazen craving in the initial sound of the word, how the lips must press together lightly to form it, how the openness of the first vowel—like a sigh, like a release—fills the back of the throat as you move through it. I discovered the punch as the lovely, open ahhh is stopped by the plosive k sound to deliver us to the quiet resignation of the word’s end: oh.

But the note that I repeatedly received from our director was that I had not yet found the depth of Irina’s sorrow. “Lindsey,” he said to me again and again. “You need to be desperate for Moscow. So desperate that the audience should feel uncomfortable watching you.” I nodded and took the note, underlining it.

I was raised in the South and studied performing arts in the Midwest before moving to the city for graduate school. As a little girl, my nightly prayers included the words, “Dear God, keep my family safe and make me good. And please God, let me make plays. And please please God, let me live in New York City.” New York had always been my Moscow, and now I was in it, I was home. I had all I’d ever hoped for, and I struggled to tell the truth onstage of the play’s themes—the brutality of change, the catastrophic longing and ever-heaping disappointments that can plague a life.

I had no frame of reference for the isolation Irina knows by the play’s end. And so I imagined saying goodbye to Siri, to Jacob. How might I touch them if I thought I might never see them again? What would it mean to spend our lives apart? To be without Jacob’s perfect laugh, without the sound of Siri singing in the hallway? We rehearsed the final moments of the play: “We may meet again sometime,” I said. I held my friend and he shook his head. “What, in ten or fifteen years? But we won’t hardly recognize each other, and we’ll be very nervous and embarrassed.”

Ten years after our Chekhovian spectacle, in a winter rendered lonesome by the ongoing pandemic, I received a text from Jeff, my doomed stage-fiancé from the play, from a former life. In the years since we graduated, some of my classmates and I continued to make plays together. We helped each other prepare for last-minute auditions. There were always groups of us clustered together in the audience when someone was in a show. But after some time, priorities shifted. For some, new hopes emerged. People began to consider lives elsewhere, to pursue other interests. It had been years since I’d seen Jeff, and to hear from him felt almost medicinal.

He wrote, “Any interest in doing a Zoom reading of Three Sisters?”

After some time, priorities shifted. For some, new hopes emerged. People began to consider lives elsewhere, to pursue other interests.

*

Anton Chekhov was familiar with illness. In addition to writing short stories and plays, he was a practicing physician. On August 1, 1892, he wrote from Melikhovo to a friend about living and working during an epidemic: “I feel lonely, for all the cholera business is alien to my heart . . . I am in absolute loneliness.” In the same letter, tired and full of worry, he wrote about the cholera riots, masses of people opposed to quarantines and other preventative measures designed to slow the spread of disease. These uproars sometimes turned fatal, with sanitary workers and police officers trampled or beaten to death. Two weeks later, he wrote, “My soul is exhausted.”

The New York Times regularly reported on the numbers of new cases of disease and climbing fatalities. On July 24, 1892, a Russian correspondent for the London Daily News wrote, “The ignorant masses refused to believe in cholera, and regarded the compulsory removal of the sick to the hospital and sanitary regulations generally as a kind of conspiracy on the part of the doctors and officials.”

Three Sisters was written in 1900 and first performed in 1901, a few years after the 1892 cholera outbreak. Chekhov wrote in a time of sickness, social upheaval, and political unrest. He wrote into a pervasive sense of uncertainty, and a deep desire to know what the future would hold. I returned to the play with a new sense of the trials faced by its inhabitants. After long months without my friends, worrying about their health, wondering what would become of us, I understood the ways I might throw my arms about them if I were able, clinging to their coats.

My former classmates and I gathered online on a Saturday afternoon, now ten years older than we’d been when we first performed the play together. I thought of canceling, overwhelmed at the thought of my friends’ faces, feeling ashamed for how much I wanted the nearness of them. But the idea of letting them down hurt more than anything else, so I brushed my hair and put on a clean sweater. I pushed a pile of laundry to a hidden corner of the bedroom, sat in front of my computer, and logged in to Zoom.

Many of my friends had left New York. Their leave-taking was slow at first, then all at once at the start of the pandemic, most of them without any real goodbye. It seemed that nearly everyone was gone. The screen filled with people I have loved, now so far away—Utah, California, Oregon. A handful among us were parents now. Someone was staying with their in-laws. Someone had followed a girlfriend across the country. Someone had been packing groceries to support their family since the spring.

Though performance was still part of each of our lives—a play here, a small movie role there—none of us gathered that day made a living as an actor, not entirely, and certainly not since live performances had come abruptly to an end. Some of us were still doggedly pursuing careers in the theater; others were more at peace with simply taking creative work when it came. From the isolation of our respective homes, we read Three Sisters together.

The play begins with Olga’s lines: “It’s a year ago today that father died. The fifth of May, Irina, your name day.” I felt awkward, acting toward the glowing screen. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, the ache in them caused by the physical absence of my scene partners. But soon, those who were not in scenes began turning off their videos to offer moments of intimacy to the ones onstage.

The three sisters remember Moscow, where they lived when they were young, when things were better, when everything seemed possible. “Life goes by and it won’t ever come back,” says Irina. “I get so depressed sometimes, it’s as if I’ve gotten old all of a sudden,” Olga says. Every one of us laughed.

When stage directions indicated the kissing of another’s hands, I could almost feel lips on my skin. “What a miserable goddamn life,” Masha, the middle sister, says. No one can sleep, lying awake all night thinking. They announce to the room when the newspaper notes another outbreak of the epidemic. At a catastrophe, someone exclaims, “What a nightmare this is. And how tired of it all I am.” Their dead mother’s clock is accidentally smashed to pieces. They are ashamed they still harbor dreams of greatness, in spite of the passage of time, in spite of the fact that little has gone the way they’d hoped it would.

The play asked questions with which our group was suddenly familiar: Why all this suffering? Is life really beautiful? How are we supposed to go on like this?

Why all this suffering? Is life really beautiful? How are we supposed to go on like this?

In the final scene of the play, I said goodbye to my friends. “Till we meet again,” I said.

My friend Arisael played one of the soldiers leaving the sisters’ provincial town. I looked at him as he spoke. “No, this time it’s goodbye for good. We’ll never see each other again.”

The sisters and those they loved posed together for a photograph.

“Hold it! Just one more time,” Arisael said.

It was almost too agonizing to read—the distance of people I cherished, all those thwarted ambitions, the way things might have gone. I think now of the dramatic principle called Chekhov’s Gun: If you hang a rifle on the wall at the start of a play, it must go off by the end. I’d imagined a life without my friends. I’d placed the promise of a terrible goodbye firmly in Act One.

Sitting in the glow of our computer screens, there was a new ache in the play, but also newfound humor, one born out of necessity, how badly we needed to laugh. The Moscow the sisters long for felt entirely to me like a lamentation for the New York City we used to inhabit together, walking arm in arm to Automatic Slim’s after curtain call. It is not a location the sisters are hungry for, but a time in their lives. But that time is gone, and they must face a season in which tomorrow feels more like a threat than a promise. The play reveals what time can do to a life, transforming it beyond recognition. I could hear my children playing in the next room as we read.

The sisters hold each other as the play ends. “Well, let them cry,” Chekhov writes. I closed my computer and wept, relieved at the new understanding I’d been offered. For so many of our pandemic months, I dealt with isolation by withdrawing further. The play reminded me of this truth: A fixation on the past robs the sisters of any chance of happiness. Life is not idle in a rehearsal studio across the river in Manhattan, waiting to begin again. It is here: The radiators hiss; I pick myself up from the floor. My daughter presses an apple to her cheek as if it is her dear friend. Still, I remember the way snow fell onto my hair beneath the stage lights, my friend beside me. That was years ago, and I remember it all exactly as if it were yesterday.

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