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The play that I watched last night adapted locally from the script “Three Sisters” by Anton Chekov was mostly great.

It was held on the stage of the main theater of the CCP. The delineated area where the actors moved about was roughly the size of two classrooms, with bleachers on all four sides.

This was on the entire stage itself of the main theater, and behind where I sat I could see covered seats of where the audience usually goes. So it meant the whole area used for this production was on the stage visible from that regular audience, which would probably be the size of six regular classrooms, that I last saw used for Miss Saigon.

Yes, I do not know what the technical term is but this was one of those rare productions that had a 360 degree view of the actors, in other words there is no side hidden from the audience.

First of all the actors and the script were great, particularly the role of the second sister Josephine. Her personality can be considered brash, and translated her frankness was funny.

One of the actresses who played the young maid of the family had no speaking lines, but only whispered to another actor if she had to relay information, a nice touch, like a running gag in some sitcoms where the spouse of a character is never seen or whose face isn’t shown.

Technically the set design was amazing. Wire frames of walls with windows simulated the boundaries of the living room used for the first two acts, rolled on the railings used for curtains.

Props such as Christmas lanterns, tree branches lowered near the stage at one end (actually over the heads of one side of the bleachers) and even a swing able to support the weight of one of the actors, were actually lowered from the rafters at different points.

There were times when we would hear the actors shouting in the areas behind us (including a pivotal gunshot that most of the audience probably ignored because the actors onstage didn’t react to it), depicting action heard offstage, which worked great for the intimate size of the audience, although some were probably not used to it.

Now to the bad parts: the nature of the stage meant that there were times that the actors’ voices were turned away from us, so it was sometimes difficult to hear as they moved about.

The first scene actually featured most of the cast of a dozen players, which was a bit overwhelming. It was the first time that I watched a play with that tactic, instead of introducing the characters in trickles for the audience to remember easily.

Finally the play was existential in nature, not really offering a solution as to why the lives of the characters worked out the way they did, reacting to the desires of some minor one-note bit players, or why their main dream was never realized in the end. But nonetheless it was a fun ride, the storytelling being engaging as well as the mechanical aspects.