The Theater: Three-Star Classic

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Over their drinks, theater people sometimes play a game: they dream up casts for great plays. With opium-pipe prodigality, they sometimes devise a Hamlet in which Lionel Barrymore plays the second gravedigger, a Macbeth in which Tallulah Bankhead plays the third witch. But they know that not only would the cost of such productions be staggering, but collecting all the right people would be a super human feat.

Not for nothing is Katharine Cornell the top-ranking actress in the U.S. theater as well as a successful producer as well as the wife of able Director Guthrie McClintic. Over the years Cornell has performed many near-miracles. She has made the yearning soul as good box office as the fiery body. She has made an invalid lady on a couch the essence of glamor. She has turned Shakespeare and Shaw into rousing hits. And when, next week, she brings her revival of Chekhov's The Three Sisters to Broadway, it will boast a dream production by anybody's reckoning — the most glittering cast the theater has seen, commercially, in this generation.

Heading it are Katharine Cornell, Ju dith Anderson, Ruth Gordon. Flanking them, moreover — in mere character parts — are Edmund Gwenn, who last season swaggered through the gaudy title role of The Wookey; Alexander Knox, who last season minced through the prissy title role of Jason; Dennis King, who made girlish hearts beat faster as the hero of Show Boat, Rose Marie, The Vagabond King.

Even for Producer Cornell, this galaxy came about more by necessity than design. She wanted to play in The Three Sisters; her husband wanted to direct it. But they found that Chekhov, perhaps the most difficult of all playwrights to do justice to, demands the most flawless casting, the most balanced acting.

Russian Revolution. With his four turn-of-the-century plays—The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard—Anton Chekhov, a tuberculous Russian doctor, quietly effected a revolution in the theater. Tossing out the well-made play with a cast-iron plot, he substituted a fluid, unemphatic, uneventful picture of life—the life of a fiberless leisure-class Russian society.

Less famous than The Cherry Orchard, but just as good, The Three Sisters pictures hopes and longings turning to frustrations and regrets. The three Prozoroff sisters and their brother Andrey live discontentedly in a dull provincial town. Olga, the eldest (Judith Anderson), is already half-doomed to schoolteaching and spinsterhood. Masha, the second sister (Katharine Cornell), is a bored neurotic married to a fatuous pedant. Irina, the youngest (Gertrude Musgrove), still high-spiritedly dreams of romance. Brother Andrey (Eric Dressier), an intellectual weakling, still dabbles with the idea of a Moscow professorship. They all have one thing in common: a desire to go to gay, brilliant, cultured Moscow—a symbol as well as a city.