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.

But they never get there because before they know it, life has passed them by. The spineless Andrey marries a vulgar, voracious shrew (Ruth Gordon), and winds up a cuckold. The unhappily married Masha has a love affair with an unhappily married army officer (Dennis King), loses him when he is sent to another regiment. Olga, the most resigned, becomes headmistress of a high school. Irina, cheated of romance, is ready to marry for affection when her fiance is killed in a duel.

A gradual and delicate sense of loss--the way people suddenly discover they are old--hovers over The Three Sisters. Everybody's life drips away in a slow leak. If there is no real despair at its end, it is because there was no real exultation at the beginning. Warmly as Chekhov reveals the pathos in these people's lives, he just as sharply exposes the self-pity. Not circumstances, but character defeats them. They forever sigh; they never struggle. Only Andrey's predatory wife gets what she is after. Chekhov neither bemoans their fate nor berates their faults; he merely smiles.

Though it has been superbly produced by Russians, The Three Sisters has never wholly come off in U.S. productions. But during its pre-Broadway tryout, Actress Cornell's production pumped enough life and emotion into the play to raise hopes that this time it would come off. McClintic's made-to-order translation is free from barnacles. His direction is sensitive.

Three Stars in a Russian Twilight. Playing their smallest roles since they achieved fame,* surprisingly the talented cast never try to upstage each other. Dressed (as Chekhov decreed) in inky black, Actress Cornell can do little but moon and yearn. But Actress Gordon is all purr and pounce. And Actress Anderson, in the play's most self-effacing role, gives an admirably self-effacing performance.

Though all three portray women under 30, Actress Gordon is 46, Actresses Anderson and Cornell 44. With 42-year-old Helen Hayes, they are the peak U.S. actresses of the peak generation for acting. All three went on the stage in their teens. All three achieved fame in their 20s. All have distinction without beauty. All have remarkable voices. All are crazy about Director McClintic, Greta Garbo,* one another. All are quite unlike.

Palpably Cornell. With her heavily lidded eyes set in a masklike face, her mannered gestures and soulful air, Actress Cornell is much more a great stage personality than a great actress. She is always, whatever she plays, palpably Katharine Cornell. She is always, even in comedy roles, on the verge of emotionalism: she has herself confessed that she is interested only in emotional parts. That interest has tempted her at times to rest on her aura--to appear in such trashy plays as The Green Hat and Dishonored Lady as well as such classics as Romeo and Juliet and Saint Joan.

Married 21 years ago, Actress Cornell and Director McClintic have lived ever since in a spacious Manhattan house overlooking the East River. For the last 17 years he has directed all but one of his wife's plays. For the last eleven years she has been her own producer. Sometimes the McClintics disagree over plays (he was thumbs down on The Green Hat, she on The Barretts of Wimpole Street, her greatest success) but they get along by "pampering" each other.

Conscious of her position, Actress Cornell maintains an almost pious attitude of noblesse oblige. She never blows up. She is fanatically punctual: if her husband is not ready on time, she leaves for rehearsals alone, waits for him at the theater. Life for her is a serious business. Her manager once remarked: "If a person has no suffering or great sorrow, they just don't interest Miss Cornell."

Distractingly Gordon. Breathless,darting Actress Gordon at her best is brilliant. Though she made her debut as Nibs in Peter Pan, no play could represent her, as actress or woman, worse. She found her roles as the gutsy young wife in Saturday's Children, the gaunt and twisted Mattie Silver in Ethan Frame, the restless, rebellious Nora of A Doll's House, the prancing, hoydenish Mrs. Pinchwife of the lewd Restoration comedy, The Country Wife. Tense, biting, almost distractingly alive, Actress Gordon would make her presence felt at the height of a hurricane.

The actress does not belie the woman. Ruth Gordon has a sharp tongue in her head, no coy sweetness, no fake modesty. Told she stands on the theater's top rung, she retorts: "It's about time." Told that The Three Sisters will be a model for aspiring actresses, she snaps: "It should be." Asked to compare her acting with Cornell's and Anderson's, she counters: "Do you say that Renoir is two inches behind Manet, or Degas a foot ahead?" She snarls at Nature: "I don't care if a flower grows upside down or inside out, I don't even care if it grows." She smacks down California: "It reminds me of a Shubert production." Unlike Actress Cornell, who has never made a movie, Actress Gordon has made several (The Edge of Darkness, Abe Lincoln in Illinois). Hollywood says she is snooty. Everyone says she is smart.

Once married to the late Actor Gregory Kelly, once rumored married to Producer Jed Harris, Actress Gordon fortnight ago married Private Garson Kanin, wiry, 30-year-old former boy wonder among Hollywood directors.

Reticently Anderson. The spinsterish Olga of The Three Sisters rose to fame, 18 years ago, as the sultry siren of Cobra. Since then Australian-born Actress Anderson has played Lavinia Mannon in O'Neill's, Mourning Becomes Electro, the Queen in the Gielgud Hamlet, the Mother of Jesus in Family Portrait, Lady Macbeth to the Macbeth of Maurice Evans. Quiet, practical, an actress without frills, she has less glow than Actress Cornell, less glitter than Actress Gordon, greater range and resourcefulness than either. Of her Critic Percy Hammond once remarked that, unlike other actresses, she could be "reticently excited." And she is painstaking. For the great sleepwalking scene in Macbeth she persuaded Johns Hopkins doctors to hypnotize a patient, and then copied the results.

Coming to the U.S. at 19 to try for the movies, she got nowhere, tramped Broadway instead. When she signed her first contract with Sam H. Harris, she was so ill at ease she mumbled: "I congratulate you."

Divorced from University of California's English Professor Benjamin H. Lehman, Actress Anderson lives near Hollywood with her 80-year-old mother in a rambling white house overlooking the Pacific, gardens, rides, shuns bright lights. Though she makes movies from time to time (Rebecca, Kings Row), Hollywood spells security for her, not art. Says she: "In Hollywood, you merely do Scene 22 at nine, Scene 16 at eleven, Scene 7 at three. It's a good place to learn how not to act."

Late Returns. Hollywood almost kept Actresses Gordon and Anderson out of The Three Sisters. To begin with, Director McClintic put off starting rehearsals for weeks because the two stars were finishing a movie, The Edge of Darkness. Errol Flynn was in the movie, and also in a mess. Had Hollywood followed its first panic impulse--to reshoot a lot of scenes --it would have meant recasting The Three Sisters. As it was, Actress Gordon arrived ten days late for rehearsals, Actress Anderson two weeks.

But, with the help of three dress rehearsals that lasted most of three nights, the show was in pretty good shape for its' swish Washington premiere. The first-night audience, which included Eleanor Roosevelt, the Maxim Litvinoffs, the Harry Hopkinses, was enthusiastic if occasionally irreverent : when Actress Cornell tossed herself too quiveringly into her lover's arms, the house roared with laughter. Afterwards the bigwigs trooped backstage. Amid his congratulations, Harry Hopkins voiced a complaint: "No man would say good-by to the woman he loves wearing heavy leather gauntlets."

Next day Ivy Litvinoff reviewed the performance in the Washington Post. With an Englishwoman's casualness about travel, and Soviet-bred disdain for Chekhov's pre-revolution neurotics, she sniffed at the idea that "it should take three perfectly healthy young women, with the price of a ticket in their pockets, four acts not to get to Moscow."

Sweetness & Light. Embarking on The Three Sisters as a labor of love, its top-notch performers have accepted not only smaller roles than usual, but smaller salaries. (Yet the show, costing $12,000 a week, is Producer Cornell's costliest production.) The whole company have also displayed their very best company manners. Everyone is "thrilled" to be playing with everyone else. When Actress Gordon had a sore throat, Actress Anderson tore to the drugstore to get her a favorite remedy. For the Broadway run, the three great ladies are virtually pushing one another into the No. 1 dressing room. In Washington, no problem existed: since the dressing rooms there are lettered instead of numbered, it was simple as A, B, C.

* The longest role in the play belongs, not to one of the three, but to snub-nosed English Ingenue Musgrove. * Actress Anderson's pet story concerns the shy Garbo's inspecting Miss Anderson's California home with a view to renting it. Garbo inquired how often the gardener came, was told "every day." Said Garbo, exiting: "Too often."

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