The Three Sisters. If the Hemingway hero was the man to whom things happened, the Chekhov hero and heroine are people to whom nothing happens. His Sisters exist in a sad purgatory of might-have-beens and never-will-bes. Masha (Kim Stanley), married at 18 to a bureaucratic clod, alternately tongue-lashes him as a clownish bore and lapses broodily into tears. Irina (Shirley Knight) has made a hysterical religion of work. Olga (Geraldine Page) is a kind of involuntary nun of duty, serving joylessly as the local school headmistress. The cultured, well-educated sisters are too weak to demand life on their own terms, too...
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