The Pittsburgh Tatler – If you were to ask me what I love most about Chekhov as a writer, I’d probably say that it’s his ability to reveal – through dialogue and situation – how most people are wrapped up in their own little dramas, a circumstance that makes them (us?) both comically and tragically oblivious. Take, for example, the character of Irina Prozorov in his play Three Sisters, who gets hysterically worked up about whether or not she’ll ever leave her country estate and get to use her Italian at a moment when other citizens in her village have just lost everything they possessed in a terrible fire. It’s a moment that shows just how keenly Chekhov observed his fellow humans, and how skillful he was at capturing the little idiosyncracies and obsessions that make each of us the divas of our own private tragicomedy.
Director Joanie Schultz has built on that keen insight in her adaptation of Chekhov’s play The Seagull, which is having its world premiere at Quantum Theatre under the title Seagull. The plot and concerns of the play remain the same: the story centers on a young writer, Constantine, who is in love with a beautiful young neighbor, Nina. Nina (Julia Rocha) aspires to be a famous actress like Constantine’s celebrated mother Irina Arkadina (Lisa Velten Smith); she also quickly becomes enamored of Irina’s boyfriend Trigorin (Brett Mack), the ‘it boy’ of the current literary scene, and sees him as a way out of the boondocks and into a career on the Moscow stage. Conflict spills out from there, with multiple iterations of unrequited love as a theme among the characters. What’s changed here, primarily, is the gender constellation: Constantine is Irina’s daughter rather than her son, played in this production by Phoebe Lloyd as a genderqueer individual whose personal heartache and creative struggles are made more intense and complex as a consequence of her marginalized status within the world of the play.
That change, along with other choices, has the effect of making this version of Seagull feel fresh and immediate, even though in terms of language, costuming, and props it remains set in the 19th century Russian countryside. Part of the immediacy comes from the immersive realism of the production’s setting: designer Chelsea Warren has situated the playing space in front of a picturesque pond on the Chatham University campus, which means that the opening scene of the play – which is meant to take place outdoors, on a makeshift stage near a lake – has an uncanny verisimilitude. I can’t imagine there have been many productions of this play in which the character of Trigorin can cast a fishing line into a natural body of water to take his mind off the pressures of writing. Moreover, the size and isolation of the elderly Sorin’s (Ken Bolden) country estate feels palpable as the characters wander up the hill behind the pond or call out from a distant building; it very much seems as if we are peeking into these characters’ lives and witnessing their private (and not-so-private) dramas as members of their world.
Two other things stand out for me in this production of Seagull. First is that it’s as much about art and artists as it is about thwarted romantic desire, and that in many ways the play wants us to recognize convergences between the two domains. The two questions: “what propels a person’s desire for another?” and “what motivates an artist to create?” dance a thematic tango. For example, Masha’s (Maxine Coltin) unrequited love for Constantine seems more than partly motivated by her wish to be associated with someone more exciting than the pedantic teacher Medvedenko (Evan Vines), while Nina’s motive to become an actress seems driven by her desire for the fame and admiration that Irina enjoys. Both are thwarted in their objectives, Masha by Constantine’s disinterest, and Nina by her lack of talent, and in both cases you’re left to wonder whether they were being honest with themselves about what they really wanted. Or another example: when Trigorin describes his life as an artist to Nina, he makes it sound like he’s driven by the kind of passion that usually attends to romantic desire – a passion that Constantine shows, from the beginning, for Nina – but at the same time Trigorin’s affect leaves open the possibility that he might be putting on a performance of “tortured artist” to impress and seduce her. The play asks us to consider: what is true passion in the realms of art and love, and what are the fictions we invent to help us cope with our desires and the obstacles that get in the way of achieving those desires?
The second thing that stood out here is how subversively and wickedly funny Chekhov is, even in this play, which ends (spoiler alert) quite tragically. Schultz and co. clearly get that there is humor here: from the minor circumstance that the caretaker Shamraev (Paul Anderson) is so obsessed with the estate’s horses that he’s blind to the fact that his wife Polina (Gwendolyn Kelso) is having an affair with the local doctor Dorn (Daniel Krell), to the more reigning circumstances of Irina’s imperious narcissism and her brother Sorin’s anxious self-involvement, to the fact that Trigorin is the kind of cad who callously and arrogantly makes art out of life. As in real life, their little dramas are all very funny (at least, to those who share that Russian sense of humor) … until they aren’t.
