To make this play work, you need to have at least ten extraordinary actors who can breathe life into all the varied nuances that Chekhov poured into these characters. Which made this the perfect play for the remarkable third-year MFA actors of UCSD to finish their college careers with. This talented group started their UCSD experience by being brought into the program by Director Kyle Donnelly, all performing their first play together in the dark comedy Betty’s Summer Vacation. Now they end their UCSD experience together again, in roles that put to test all that they have learned in their craft, and allow them to create and explore characters that are as good as they come. In so doing, they turn in their most extraordinary performances to date, creating a piece of ensemble work at its finest.

If there is a central character to this story, it is the youngest sister Irina (Dikla Marshall). It is her bubbly optimism and vision of going to Moscow and meeting Prince Charming that gives the story its bright and highly amusing beginning, and it will be the complete destruction of those dreams that gives the story its final tragedy. Her opening cheeriness is contagious to both the audience and her household – a household in which she refuses to let in any negativity. But there are seeds of tragedy all around her. As those seeds germinate, Irina and her family struggle to hold onto the ever-fainter hopes of their youth.

The tragic threads are manifold. There is the jaded Masha (Joy Osmanski) who married young to a very kind but unexciting man who worships her (Alex Smith), but whom she can now barely stand to be around. Enter the dashing and idealistic military officer, not to mention a married father of two, named Vershinin (John Staley). His eloquent words melt away Masha’s cynicism, and she suddenly finds herself truly in love for the first time. Vershinin, in an unhappy marriage himself, welcomes her advances, while Masha’s husband Kulygin tries his best to look past or ignore the obvious affair that Masha makes no effort to hide from him. The three of them combine for perhaps the most poignant scene when it is time for Vershinin’s regiment to leave the country, leaving Masha in unabashed anguish as she clings to her lover, while her husband Kulygin waits loyally nearby, stifling his own painful tears, ready to hopefully win back her love – prepared even to make a fool of himself to cheer her up with a pair of big-nose-and-bushy-eyebrows glasses which magically turns one of the saddest scenes into one of the most amusing and tender.

Then there is the sisters’ younger brother Andrey (David McMahon), a talented and intelligent young man whose big hopes for the future are only dwarfed by his sisters’ enthusiasm for what he could accomplish. But his dreams get sidetracked when he marries the wrong woman. That woman is Natasha played by Emily Donahoe. At first Andrey’s sisters are just bemused by the hysterically oversensitive girl with a hick accent who makes her own ridiculous clothing and begins crying pathetically at the least thing. But once Natasha is firmly entrenched in the household, she begins to dominate them all, cuckolding her husband and making his sisters feel like unwanted guests in their own home. The lonely, eldest sister Olga (Kathleen Mary Carthy), the closest thing the family has to a parent or leader, is eventually driven to even further loneliness by the cruel Natasha.

And then there is the young Irina (Dikla Marshall). At the ripe old age of 24, she still has not met her Prince Charming, and has given up hope of ever moving back to Moscow where the family grew up and shared such happy childhoods. So she settles for the hand of her nice friend Tusenbach (Michael Keyloun) who loves her dearly, and will marry her and take care of her even though she is upfront with the fact that she feels no fire or passion for him. But even that second-rate happiness may evade her due to the town bully, Solyony (Daoud Heidami). What seems like harmless teasing at first becomes more serious and dangerous as time wears on, and Solyony’s obsession with Irina takes a very disturbing turn.

This incredible group of actors were joined by other great ensemble members including the talented third-year graduate director Suzanne Agins, undergrads Nick Triplett, Eric Evenskaas, Adam Day, and Bethany Lockhart, and a masterful performance by professor Jim Winker as the aging, world-weary doctor Chebutykin who is burdened with a drinking problem, a memory problem, and a sense of worthlessness, but usually manages to keep his sense of humor anyway.

Director Kyle Donnelly, who directed the Globe’s imaginative and hilarious production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2001, started getting the cast into their roles months ago to allow them to grow into the people they would portray. Kyle also demonstrates a keen grasp of Chehov’s work, highlighting some of the early dramatic tension with well-placed pauses and lighting effects, and enhancing some of the comic effects including an uproarious “quickie” sex scene between young lovers Andrey and Natasha that takes place out of sight (but certainly not out of earshot), right behind one section of the audience’s seats!

It’s a play overflowing with surprising humor, remarkable characters, a beautifully woven plot, and some of the best acting I’ve seen by a young cast who dug deeply to fully become the characters that Chekhov challenges actors to become in his play – a play presenting us with the universal human dramas of unrequited love, lost love, shattered dreams, and death. The world-weary doctor vainly tries to convince himself that such tragedies are unimportant. “It doesn’t matter,” he mutters numbly, fighting back tears. “None of it matters.”