Dan Downing

And by deliberate association, cross off The American Repertory Theatre.

At Michael’s suggestion, for Christmas I gave Linda tickets to see The Three Sisters, and so we pilgrimaged into definitely-not-our-old-Harvard Square Thursday evening.

We dined at The Harvest, and began feeling like interlopers in a wealthy-Cambridge-academia milieu that is not us. Good, but way overpriced, oysters, Caesar’s salad , and Tuna.

As we approached the ART, I prophetically said to Linda, “you know, hun, this may not be our scene”.

It wasn’t.

The theatre was small, our seats had a good view — but not the intimate feel-the-actors-sweat Mike experienced when he and Di saw Desire Under the Elm Tree (or something like that) earlier this year. The main thing is we had aisle seats (I can explain to anyone interested how I managed to trick the on-line box office into giving me those).

The play was supposed to be about three unmarried sisters stuck in a provincial Russian town, yearning to go to Moscow, and finally being wooed by soldiers stationed in the local garrison.

Within 15 minutes I thought we’d mistakenly walked into Sartre’s No Exit, with the audience, rather that the actors, trapped in hell.

The action was glacial. What passed for dialog were meaningless utterance separated by 45-second pregnant pauses that were acoustically hard to hear. The characters had to have been insane.

“Delirious ennui”, the Globe said about the first act. We agreed. We up and left before the intermission, having given the drama more than enough time to unfold and explain itself, along with another couple.

On the walk back to the car, Linda and I mused about how many empty seats there would be after the intermission, versus how many would stick out the 3 ¬Ω hour production.

Definitely not our scene.

We learned later that Mark and Ginger saw this play in London and loved it. Go figure.

Here’s $100 to send Director Krystian Lupa packing back to Prague.