The same scene as in Act I. Eight o’clock in the evening. Behind the scenes in the street there is the faintly audible sound of a concertina. There is no light.
Eisendrath finds himself early on in Act II of The Three Sisters. He’s on the stage of the New Players Community Theatre in Covington, Kentucky. It’s opening night, the high-school gym. How he got here isn’t important right now. Neither is the fact that Eisendrath hasn’t acted since an eighth-grade production of Little Mary Sunshine, and even then he was only one of a chorus of five singing forest rangers. The last time he was in Kentucky was five years ago, before his life imploded. His lines, what in the fuck are his lines?
Masha Prozorova Kulygina, who is facing him, now says something incomprehensible after a long and seemingly meaningful pause.
MASHA: What noise there is in the stove right now. Not long before Father’s death there was a howling in the chimney just like that. The very same!
Eisendrath is, at least he is supposed to be, the irredoubtable Aleksandr Ignatyevich Vershinin, forty-three, formerly the Lovesick Major, a man with two children and a wife who frequently, even once during the play itself, tries to poison herself just to spite him. A gallant who breezily says, Two or three hundred years from now, the world will be inexpressibly beautiful and all this suffering will have been worth it. In Act III, a place we will not reach tonight, Masha confesses to her sisters that she loves Vershinin for his voice, his speeches, his theorizing, his misfortunes, but even now, in Act II, Eisendrath can see this love in her eyes. The woman playing Masha is not a great actress, but she’s trying, and she’s not unsubtle, and she’s even a little beautiful in exactly the way the three sisters are beautiful: weary, resigned, fatigued by expectation. If only they could make it back to Moscow. Everything will be different in Moscow. By day Masha is Susan Stempler and she works eighty-hour weeks in Customer Service at Bank One across the river in Cincinnati. She has yearned to act since she was a kid, and here she is—and here is Vershinin, a glib character if there ever was one, and he has suddenly and irrevocably forgotten all his lines, and apparently who the hell he is, even.
Eisendrath tries looking at the scars in the wood of the stage, at the audience, which is nothing but a black muddle. He can feel the hot breath of all the people wafting on his cheeks. He stares back at her, at this Masha who is taller than he in flat shoes, who is miserably married to the jolly ignoramus Kulygin, the schoolmaster. This will be the longest moment of his life, not because time stops, but because it continues to stomp forward and onward like the triple-named soldiers of Vershinin’s own platoon, who pound through the back rooms of this play. Eisendrath’s fear is so palpable at this point it could almost be mistaken for drama. A man in one of the back rows begins to cough ravenously, and his boomings echo as if the entire gym is at the bottom of some canyon, and still Masha locks her exhausted, sorrowful eyes on Eisendrath, eyes that of course are also Susan Stempler’s, begging him to say something, anything, anything at all, just move your lips. We’re about to move from glitch to fiasco. How fast we sink. Eisendrath looks down at his uniform as if there’s a clue in the olive jacket the volunteer costume designer (also playing the crone Anfisa) picked up at the army surplus. Vershinin has a few medals pinned to his chest, not many. This is to show that in spite of his many years of loyal military service, he’s never been much for valor. The Lovesick Major’s head is too much in the clouds. Eisendrath looks around at the set, at the drawing room, at the old but solid, not yet ratty furniture. Weird. It’s all vaguely familiar. And though there’s no chance whatsoever that his lines are lodged somewhere in his brain—Eisendrath is not even certain he’s ever even read this play—he almost feels like settling down, right here in this little gymnasium. Sweat and tears course down Susan Stempler’s cheeks, and her eyes, desperate now—this, the one thing I’ve ever wanted. Can’t you speak at all?
Panic rises in the wings and then a voice, shouting disguised as a whisper:
WINGS: Are you superstitious?
VERSHININ: Are you superstitious?
MASHA: Yes, I am superstitious.
WINGS: That’s strange. (Pause.) You’re a splendid, wonderful woman, splendid, wonderful. It’s dark in here and I can see your eyes shining.
(Masha shoves her hand in Eisendrath’s face, and so he kisses it, Susan’s hand. It tastes of sweat and Jergen’s.)
VERSHININ: You’re a splendid, winderful woman. It’s dark and I can hear your eyes shining.
(Masha walks over to the other side of the stage, plops in a chair, crosses her feet.)
MASHA: It’s lighter over here.
Eisendrath tries to move closer to the light, but he can’t, his feet won’t budge, and perhaps thirty seconds pass, maybe even a minute, and he does not hear the wings begging, nearly shrieking now—
WINGS: I love you, I love you…
VERSHININ:
MASHA: When you talk to me like this, for some reason I laugh, though I am frightened. Please don’t say it again… Say it again. Go ahead, I don’t care.
(Masha covers her eyes with her hands.)
WINGS: I love your eyes, I love the way you move…
VERSHININ:
MASHA: Say it! I don’t care! Say it!
VERSHININ:
A play is a fixed planet, and Eisendrath has fallen off by now. But even this doesn’t matter anymore. Love? How would he know it if he saw it? He’d stroke Susan Stempler’s now drenched face if he could reach her, if he could ever reach her.