“We long for happiness, but it’s more like crappiness,” Olga sighs and rhymes, her cheeks stark white in the harsh bright glare. This dark and occasionally humorous adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s drama The Three Sisters: A Tale of Dream and Woe (directed and adapted by Miriam BC Tobin) presented by Modern But Classical Theatre  at The Brooklyn Lyceum centers around three sisters who mourn the disappointments of their life and pray for an escape to a better life to Moscow, away from the small hick town and its uneducated masses.

Atop their high chairs –like maidens trapped in ivory towers– Irina (Alex Vincent), Masha (Emily Davison) and Olga (Sarah Hartley) are trapped in their chairs, unable to face the terrors at home, or to break out and escape to a better life; they are caged in the home their father left them, caught in a self-perpetuating cycle of inaction. In order to cope with their devastatingly disappointing lives, the three sisters develop strange nervous tics: Olga speaks in a rhyme and a constant air of nostalgia, always recalling a lost childhood memory; Irina, the constant drunk whose frequent use of malapropisms quickly becomes gimmicky after her first three lines; and Masha, who refers to herself in the third person, always discontent and weary of the world.

Andrei, the youngest brother (Tim Gilligan) and his deranged wife (Charlie Wilson) add even more drama to the play and a fierce physicality that is more all the more striking considering that the three sisters are trapped in their chairs. Charlie Wilson was a brilliant Natasha (although his presence seemed like another tasteless gimmick for the laughs), striking the clever note of insanity and intense rage, changing moods so quickly that it left a vivid sense of whiplash.

Crammed with strange bellows and nonsensical monologues, the play dragged on during the middle, supported only by Natasha’s fleeting cameos and the wonderful music (French Horn by Amanda Tabor). The characters fell into histrionic after histrionic to the point where it became expected, and even dull to watch the three sisters moan and cry Moskva! and dream of a better tomorrow. The play ends on a haunting note, with all three sisters dragging themselves off their chairs, a smiling Natasha looming over the three and a soft, echoing Moskva! And so a tale of woe and dreams ended, almost appropriately, on a note of disappointment.