The Theatregoer The Three Sisters at the Loeb through Dec. 13

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, people who write reviews are human beings. Like anybody else in the audience, they can come to the theatre with an upset stomach or a hangover. They can be happy or depressed or somewhere in between. And because critics actually can be any of these things, their job is a lot harder than many people think. It is not always easy for a reviewer to clear his head of pre-curtain-time emotions and look objectively at what's doing on the stage.

I explain all this because it relates strongly to my reaction to The Three Sisters , which opened on the Loeb mainstage Thursday night. As I entered the theatre, I was just not in any condition to function as a journalist: I was physically exhausted and emotionally pre-occupied. In this context, maybe you can understand how remarkable it is to me that Leland Moss's production of the Chekhov play not only kept me awake for its entire three-and a-quarter hour duration-but sometimes even succeeded in making me forget everything else except what the actors on stage were giving to the audience.

I emphasize the fact that the actors give, because their power of giving was immense. It was irresistible; I think even the dead would have to respond. And the actors' dedication to giving is here because of the theories director Moss has used for guidance in his show-those of Jerzy Grotowski. she now-famous mentor of the Polish Laboratory Theatre.

In his essay, "Towards a Poor Theatre," Grotowski calls for a theatre devoid of theatrical apparatus and full of human contact. That means the replacement of sets, costumes, lighting, and make-up with a total emphasis on "the actor-spectator relationship of perpetual, direct, live' communion." Grotowski wants, of all things, to give the theatrical experience back to the people who are actually in the theatre when the performance takes place-that is, the actors and the audience, period. In such a "Pour Theatre." not only will the designers and stagehands be eliminated, but so will the playwright. Grotowski sees all theatrical technicians as belonging to the "Rich Theatre" or to the movies.

Of course, there is a place for both the "Poor" and "Rich" theatre in the scheme of things. And besides, very little theatre is purely "Rich" or purely "Poor" anyhow. A total "Poor Theatre" may even be an impossible or unnecessary achievement. While many critics feel Grotowski has achieved his goal with his own troupe (a group of actors he trained for seven years). others (notably Walter Kerr) shy away doubting whether Grotowski? ideas should eve be pushed to their ultimate, gut-level extreme.

With his Three Sisters. Leland Moss takes some very large first steps (particularly considering he has had two months, not seven years, with his actors) toward achieving Grotowski's total "Poor Theatre."

Amazingly enough, Moss accomplishes not only the easy part of the job-removing all the stage's physical accessories-but much of the hard part-actor-audience communion-as well. And in doing that, he makes a powerful case for the validity of an ideal Grotowski theatre.

The production itself is difficult to describe. It is not shocking in the way the Living Theatre is shocking (nor is it at all like the Living Theatre, for that matter), but it is different from probably anything you have seen in a theatre before. From beginning to end, the actors run the show. They adjust the lights, they move the furniture, they control the play: they dance, they sing, they scream, they make animal noises.

ORDINARILY in this country. Chekhov's works have been performed by actors who subscribe to Stanislavski's "method." a revolutionary approach to acting which developed around Chekhov's plays in turn-of-the-century Russia. Method actors have trained us to think of Chekhov plays as having quiet, detailed surfaces under which internalized explosions almost imperceptively crupt. In Moss's Three Sisters, this now-standard approach to the playwright is turned inside out (and must be, since Grotowski's views on acting are in practice, if not purpose, almost diametrically opposed to Stanislavski's).

This Three Sisters. then, raises the explosions to the surface. The eruptions exist above the script. They happen when the actors feel they should happen, regardless of what is actually being said. While this can and does happen in a conventional Chek-hov production, the difference is that in this production the explosions are never suppressed. We not only feel them but see them. Characters (actors) almost violently grab for each other when they feel love. They growl at each other when they feel hate. They dance and spin when they are happy. The power of the production, ideally, operates on a conscious rather than a sub-conscious level.

And in that lies a real problem. There is no getting around the fact that Chekhov wrote his play for Stanislavskian actors. The Three Sisters is (and this is a classi-fication, not a judgment) a "rich" play. While the work has explosions underneath much of its surface, some of the play is just surface. For the purposes of a "poor" theatre, the Chekhovian detail that is not sitting on top of emotional volcanoes is useless. No doubt Moss will encourage his company to try new things every night, and certainly one thing he will try to do is cut out the "rich" parts of the script. After all, the goal is the climination of virtually all words.

Still, as of opening night, enough pure cathartic moments were spread over the three hours to make one forget about the periods of waste. And when those moments came, the cast- uniformly one of the hardest working ones I have ever seen- usually held little back as they shared them with the audience.

Nancy Cox (Olga), Susan Yakutis (Masha), Martin Andrucki (Vershinin), Deborah Holzel (Natasha), Daniel Seltzer (Doctor), Paul Shutt (Kulygin), and practically everyone else-all let their souls pour over the auditorium from time to time if not all the time. Lori Heineman as Irina and Andre Bishop as Andrei go even further than that, opening themselves up to let us see their entire nervous systems almost every second they are on stage. No matter how self-enclosed you are upon arrival at the Loeb during the next two weeks, you simply will not be able to pass up Heineman and Bishop's "poor" gift of their uncovered hearts. As you'll discover, Grotowski is giving poverty a good name.