What people are saying about THREE SISTERS COME AND GO

"Every detail of Crispino's Three Sisters Come and Go accumulates into a sumptuous, hilarious, heartbreaking whole in which we are unwittingly drawn into the inescapable essence of our being but can't look away for the sheer beauty of it all. "    – Darius Marder, Director “ Loot”

“Three Sisters Come and Go is a mesmerizing feast for the eyes and mind.  I rarely see theatrical work this beautiful, engaging and insightful.  From its opening – the precise Come and Go by Samuel Beckett – to its haunting conclusion, Three Sisters Come and Go is a captivating tour de force.  I sincerely hope to see it on stage again.”    – Monserrat Mendez, Award-winning Playwright

“Three Sisters Come & Go sounds like yet another piece that will offer that rare experience when an audience is challenged as well as entertained. This lab houses the kind of work that defies societal norms and to that effect, it truly has established itself as a laboratory for exciting and experimental work.” –Michael Roderick, Broadway World

“Three Sisters Come and Go was beautifully conveyed in movement, design and dramaturgically. The text was an excellent pairing of the two great masters Chekhov and Beckett and offered a wonderful resonance between the two plays... I was constantly drawn in.... And the unexpected humor gave the text the freshness and lucidity that I am sure the playwrights sought when they were creating the plays. Congratulations and I hope this work has a long future ahead.”    – Helen Richardson, Associate professor, CUNY

"The seamless acting of Liza Cassidy, Claire Helene and Jackie Lowe...succeeded in being at once characters and caricatures of their characters.  One moment they’d have you sympathizing with their deepest sorrows, and the next moment they’d laugh off their own despair, and you’d laugh it off with them. ...surprisingly emotionally resonant"  – Sarah V. Schweig, The Happiest Medium

“Before seeing the Theaterlab play, I had not realized the aesthetic power of theater performance to deal with contemporary issues of critical reflection.”    – Steve Goldberg, Professor, Asian Art History, Hamilton College

A tragicomedy drawing on the texts of Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett & Julia Kristeva

September 29 – October 10, 2010

Advance Tickets $15/$12

$20 at the door

reservations recommended: 212-929-2545

Sept. 29 – pay-what-you-can night!

Reception follows

Dramaturgy

Orietta Crispino and Marco Casazza

Directed by Orietta Crispino

Assistant Director - Marco Casazza

Costumes and Curtains by

Sara Baldocchi-Byrne

Performed by

Liza Cassidy

Claire Helene

Jackie Lowe

"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,

  I grant you that."   –  Nell, Endgame

From the Press Release:

The Alchemical Theatre, the resident theater company at Theaterlab, will present THREE

SISTERS COME AND GO, a piece conceived and directed by Orietta Crispino, September 29 through

October 10, 2010 at Theaterlab (137 West 14th Street). 

THREE SISTERS COME AND GO follows the lives of the three archetypal women of Chekhov's plays read

through the lens of Beckett's comic take on the existential dilemma, and Julia Kristeva's insight regarding the

transformation of despair and loss into joy and acceptance. Bound to living together, each of the sisters is

comically obsessed with being the most unhappy of the group.

“The sisters play the game of theater finding a future in the present of the stage,” explains director Orietta

Crispino. “After all, there is life beyond despair.”  

THREE SISTERS COME AND GO opens with Samuel Beckett’s dramaticule Come and Go, which serves as

the model for a geometry of the unspoken, the unsettling reality of consisting beyond the veil of

representation.  Three women sitting in perfect stillness together repeat a cycle of the action, the revelation

of a secret never heard by the audience.  The remainder of the piece features recombined text from

Chekhov’s major plays.   

The piece was devised through a collective process among director Orietta Crispino (who conceived the

piece), Italian dramaturg Marco Casazza, and the three actresses: Liza Cassidy (Patricia Wilson’s Zia

Dance Company), Claire Helene, and Jackie Lowe (Broadway: THE TAP DANCE KID, AIN’T MISBEHAVIN,

EUBIE, THE FIRST, and WIND IN THE WILLOWS).  The group scoured Chekhov’s work act by act, collecting

lines mostly from the female characters.  Through a cut and paste technique, each actress reordered the

material creating one monologue and one dialogue scene (using only Chekhov’s words).  Then, Crispino and

Casazza shaped and developed the piece.

The workshop production of THREE SISTERS COME AND GO earlier this year was hailed as “a

mesmerizing feast for the eyes and mind by award-winning playwright Montserrat Mendez and “surprisingly

emotionally resonant” by The Happiest Medium.

THREE SISTERS COME AND GO is made possible in part with public funds from the Manhattan Community Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.  Come and Go is presented through special arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc. on behalf of the Estate of Samuel Beckett.

FULL PRESS RELEASE: Three_Sisters_Come_and_Go_press_release2.pdf

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE

2010

Wed.  Sept. 29 - 8 PM

Thur.  Sept. 30 - 8 PM

Sat.    Oct. 2 - 8 PM

Sun.   Oct 3  - 3 PM and 7 PM

Wed.  Oct. 6 - 8 PM

Thur.  Oct. 7 - 8 PM

Fri.     Oct. 8 - 8 PM

Sat.    Oct. 9 - 8 PM

Sun.   Oct. 10 - 3 PM

SEE NYTHEATRE.COM REVIEW