Village Voice
June 13-19, 2001
by Michael Feingold
Living in present-day Moscow, the three biological sisters in Janusz Glowacki's The Fourth Sister have nothing but the kind of social-historical problems that Mamet ignores. Russians are still Chekhovian, flipping instantly from manic joy to silent melancholy, while their petty cares and giant heartbreaks cross everybody else's, till every cramped apartment's an emotional minefield. Nobody has any money except the Mafiya; the violence that goes with it can touch any life in Moscow. Nor is there any escape: The three girls' "fourth sister," who's really an orphan boy they've decked out in drag to impersonate a child prostitute in an American documentary on the city, gets to fly to Hollywood and appear on the Oscar telecast to boot. But even that doesn't improve life. Americans—especially Russians who've settled in America—turn out to be vicious, betraying, violent pimps just like their Muscovite counterparts. The one person who actually keeps his word to any of the sisters is a nice young fellow who's smuggling black-market arms to Islamic extremists; don't expect him to end happily.
Sounds accurate enough, doesn't it? Glowacki's caught the chaotic spirit of life in contemporary Moscow, and in his best scenes he's grounded it in a tangle of human feelings that has the tensile strength of the original Chekhovian weave. The only thing he hasn't done is turned the material into a play. Chekhov concealed but never neglected his dramatic action; Glowacki just paints the condition. Now it's funny, now it's sad, now it's humiliating, now it's horrifying. But the condition never changes, and the people never evolve as a result of it; they just plod on from episode to episode. Both the gangster and the moviemaker business give off a faintly rancid whiff of day-old commercial goods, and the play's constant jump-cutting and crisscrossing, though well handled in Lisa Peterson's production, tend to look more like glitzy showboating than dramaturgic economy.
It's really too bad, because at his most responsible, Glowacki's a powerfully impressive writer, and Peterson, whose productions of less flashy authors tend to look obnoxiously mannered, is wholly attuned to his style, producing an unpressured, steady flow of visual events and a battery of extremely fine performances: Suzanne Shepherd as a motherly neighbor, Lee Pace as her entrepreneurial son, Bill Buell as the girls' military father, Alicia Goranson and Jessica Hecht as the tenderest and the most heart-bruised of the sisters, and Steven Rattazzi as the double-dealing documaker are all doing first-class work. But the effect's like that of a Russian government office: Items get shifted smartly from desk to desk, but to no avail, because the office has no actual function.
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