Director -- and I daresay master magician! -- 
Austin Pendleton and his cast of incredible actors has infused Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters  with such quicksilver artistry, beauty and pathos on Manhattan's East 13th Street it should be transferred to Broadway faster than Olga, one of the Three Sisters, says, "let's go to Moscow!"

The production at the Classic Stage Company officially opened February 3 and is scheduled to run to
 March 6 at 136 East 13th Street.

And whatever Pendleton may do next I seriously doubt there will ever again be such an emotionally shattering yet alternately amusing production of this classic Chekhov play in New York.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is a mesmerizing Masha, who falls hopelessly in love with the married Vershinin, so superbly, suavely played by Peter Sarsgaard he reminded me of John Barrymore as the doomed baron in the film Grand Hotel; Jessica Hecht, who was most recently on Broadway in the revival of Neil's Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs, breaks our hearts with her dogged determination to work in a Czarist society where the privileged upper classes -- and her sisters -- often wallowed in empty dreams; Juliet Rylance is radiant as Irina who promises to marry someone, not for love, but out what she feels is the of the sheer boredom of her life in a provincial Russian town.

Louis Zorish and the entire cast are so brilliant under Pendleton's touch that this production of Three Sisters marks a new dawn of classic drama Off-Broadway.