By Robert Avila

WE BELIEVE, somehow, that as humanity passes through time, we are better able to live life to the fullest. The delusion is reinforced in the age of technology by the steady stream of gadgetry we've come to depend on. But like shoppers so laden with packages they confuse the up escalator with the down one, we are taken nowhere by the march of progress. Instead, e-mail, Palm Pilots, Internet-ready cellular phones, and other "liberating" inventions blur the line that separates work from an ever shrinking private life and tie us closer to the drudgery of labor. As Chekhov's three sisters beat their delicate wings against the bars of a rustic cage in American Conservatory Theater's current production, the nature of work's triumph over leisure is revealed.

Bred for better things by their late father, Three Sisters' cultivated Prozorovs – Olga (Lorri Holt), Masha (René Augesen), and Irina (Katharine Powell), along with their brother, Andrei (Tommy A. Gomez) – are somewhat comical as big fish in a small Russian pond. "We know a lot that's unnecessary," Masha says with her characteristic bite. And Irina acknowledges, "Our life hasn't been so beautiful – it's choking us up like a lawn full of weeds." Only the soldiers from the garrison, the sole repository of culture outside their home, offer some relief from the boredom and claustrophobia of their lives. The sisters pine for their hometown of Moscow and envision a splendid life there in the near future. Meanwhile, Olga and Irina are forced to work, and Masha is trapped in a loveless marriage to schoolteacher Kulygin (Gregory Wallace).

But this does not prevent the characters, including the officers paying calls, from continually grasping for some ideal called "work" or another called "love." On the cusp of the last millennium, Chekhov's characters also stand on the threshold of Russian modernism, the fading of the aristocratic order and its replacement by the bourgeoisie. Their endless vacillation between passion and resignation marks this shift, as well as the playwright's exceedingly modern skepticism. "Man must work," Irina declares, ridiculously adding, "How wonderful it must be to wake up in the morning and pave streets!" – the pet philosophy of Baron Tusenbach (Anthony Fusco). Colonel Vershinin (Marco Barricelli), foiled by a bad marriage, takes refuge in the ideal of a new age and progress: "Our task is to work and work; happiness is for our descendents." Meanwhile, they take no notice of their servants, who share no illusions about work. Indeed, Anfisa (Joan Mankin), whom Olga allows to retire in compensation for 30 years service, can imagine no one happier than herself.

In fact, it is precisely work and marriage that stifle and corrupt the characters. Work exhausts Olga and takes the blush off the rose that is Irina, as marriage drives Masha progressively mad. Andrei's marriage to provincial Natasha (expertly played by Mirjana Jokovic) ultimately leads to the sisters' losing their home. In this way The Three Sisters, much like The Cherry Orchard, marks the evanescence of the old aristocratic order. If it was untenable, morally speaking, since it required the subjugation of the majority, Chekhov – sympathetic to the progressive anti-czarist movement of his time and only two generations removed from serfdom himself – nevertheless recognizes the space it allowed for the cultivation of the self and looks with deep ambivalence on a future that threatens not to multiply the likes of the Prozorov sisters (as Virshinin predicts) but to wipe them out.

Chekhov is no polemicist, and his masterpiece runs far deeper, probing the nature of the human condition. Ultimately, he explores with inimitable humor and compassion the lived moment between the past, with its sense of loss, and the future, with its seemingly necessary fantasies of salvation. Hence, the play opens with a birthday celebrated in the shadow of a death. The Prozorov sisters look to the past even while anticipating the future. Nothing changes, however, except that each day further vitiates the lives and dreams of the sisters. Hope briefly looms for two of them: Irina hopes to escape drudgery and premature old age through a loveless marriage to Baron Tusenbach, and Masha would escape a loveless marriage via her affair with the dashing Virshinin. Naturally, these hopes are dashed, and the sisters never reach Moscow. But as if to underscore the necessity of such futile hopes, the play ends in a strange, ambivalent mood that combines a note of rebirth – again in the shadow of a death, as the sisters vow to live on and fulfill their dreams – with the ineffectual doctor Chebutykin (Steven Anthony Jones) muttering that nothing really matters anyway.

This sweetly melancholic, nearly absurdist tone, so worthy of the label Chekhovian, does not quite blossom as it should. Director Carey Perloff's lavish but fairly lifeless production sacrifices complexity in service of comic or dramatic effects. Natasha's vulgarity, for example, is played only for laughs at the expense of the pity Chekhov also intended. And Masha's one-dimensional fury does nothing to generate the compassion we might expect to feel. Similarly Ralph Funicello's imposing set – which encapsulates the human dilemma by situating the characters between an infinite blackness to one side and a wall of windows letting in the light on the other – somehow looks unlived in (though between those two poles is just where the living is done).