Their names are Olive, Marsha and Irene instead of Olga, Masha and Irina, and they’re siblings, too. But any more substantial similarities between Atlanta writer/director Thomas W. Jones II’s updated musical “Three Sistahs” and Anton Chekhov’s classic Russian drama “The Three Sisters” mostly end there.
Thus, the questionable conceit saddles this slick Horizon Theatre show with a greater air of pretentiousness than a real sense of purpose, which wasn’t the case with “A Cool Drink a Water,” Jones’ sequel of sorts to “A Raisin in the Sun” that Horizon premiered in 2009.
A remount of the company’s original 2006 production, “Sistahs” reunites local divas Bernardine Mitchell (“His Eye is on the Sparrow”) and Crystal Fox (“For Colored Girls...”), reprising their roles as the maternal spinster Olive and the unhappily married Marsha. Up-and-comer Amber Iman (“Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery”) takes over the part of Irene.
Tellingly, perhaps, there’s no mention of Chekhov anywhere in the playbill. Although Jones wrote the script, the story is credited to Janet Pryce. She moves it to 1969 Washington, D.C., primarily to accommodate Irene’s evolution into a strident “would-be radical” a la Angela Davis.
The Bradshaw sisters gather for a third funeral in as many years. Having already buried both their parents, now they’re grieving the death of their younger brother, a reluctant soldier killed while serving in Vietnam.
That the characters are black is nearly incidental. After a fashion, so is the fact they’re women. By placing most of her sociopolitical focus on the war abroad, Pryce (via Irene) essentially downplays the civil rights and women’s lib movements that were hitting closer to home at the time. (The story might have felt more relevant and less shortsighted set in 2011, substituting Iraq for Vietnam.)
Such as they are, the family dynamics are adroitly portrayed by the cast, but the show swings unevenly between levity and heaviness. From one moment to the next, the sisters are cutting loose about their first sexual experiences and then suddenly trading bitter memories from their individual or collective pasts.
In several scenes, they sit around reading aloud or singing about the letters of dead relatives, with disconnecting results — removing them and us from the matter at hand: their personal relationships with one another.
The alternately soulful and spirited songs (music by William Hubbard, lyrics by Jones) aren’t listed in the program, and some barely qualify as songs so much as isolated notes to convey a random thought. Despite a few echoing glitches with their (possibly needless) body mics, Mitchell, Fox and Iman provide powerful vocals, accompanied by assistant music director S. Renee Clark on keyboards.
A lot of the show’s conflict involves selling the Bradshaw home, and Jones periodically projects images of trees beyond the invisible walls of the set. If that’s meant to suggest “The Cherry Orchard,” consider it another superficial wink to Chekhov.
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