The Sisters, a nine-character ensemble drama, reconstitutes the always complex, often wintry family relationships of Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters in a wood-paneled New York university faculty lounge. The three sisters and their brother, a family of scholars, have always been mutually regarding planets in an exclusive little solar system; they are the literate, self-conscious off-spring of a college chancellor, now deceased, whose memory may not be universally esteemed. There's Olga, the serious, austere one (Mary Stuart Masterson); Marcia, the beautiful, bitchy one (Maria Bello); Irene, the pampered, troubled 22-year-old "baby" of the group (Erika Christensen); and Andrew, the brother (Alessandro Nivola), who, his sisters think, is about to make the mistake of his life, marrying an uncultured shop girl (Elizabeth Banks) beneath their academic, acerbic selves. Flamboyant Marcia, who fancies herself a "coquette from another era" and admits she flaunts her emotional scars in public, gets many of the best lines, telling her careerist psychiatrist husband, for example, that as usual he's gone from pompous to obnoxious without stopping at amusing, but all the players get their share of delicious biting dialogue. Eric McCormack, Tony Goldwyn, Rip Torn, and Chris O'Donnell play the men in the sisters' lives.