SOURCE: "Three Sisters," in The Hudson Review XXX, No. 4, Winter 1977-78, pp. 525-43.

In the following essay, Moss focuses on the motivations, values, and interrelations of the characters in Three Sisters, maintaining that "the webs of characters obscure—and enrich—the scaffold of action" in the drama.

"Loneliness is a terrible thing, Andrei."

In Three Sisters, the inability to act becomes the action of the play. How to make stasis dramatic is its problem and Chekhov solves it by a gradual deepening of insight rather than by the play of event. The grandeur of great gestures and magnificent speeches remains a Shakespearian possibility—a diminishing one. Most often, we get to know people through the accretion of small details—minute responses, tiny actions, little gauze screens being lifted in the day-to-day pressure of relationships. In most plays, action builds toward a major crisis. In Three Sisters, it might...