The Seagull
Through Jan. 28 (final performance tonight, Saturday, at 8 p.m.) at the Yale University Theatre, 222 York St., New Haven.
By Anton Chekhov. Translated by Paul Schmidt. Directed by Alexandru Mihail. Scenic Designer: Kristen Robinson. Costume Designer: Maria Hooper. Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring. Sound Designer and Original Music: Keri Klick. Projection Designer: Paul Lieber. Production Dramaturg: Elliot B. Quick. Stage Manager: Alyssa K. Howard. Performed by: Seamus Mulcahy (Treplev), Jillian Taylor (Nina), Brenda Meaney (Arkadina), Chris Henry (Trigorin), Carmen Zilles (Masha), Will Cobbs (Sorin), Charles Margossian (Yakov), Max Roll (Dorn), Winston Duke (Shamrayev), Sheria Irving (Paulina) and Jen Mulrow (The Cook).
Sorry to be late in reviewing The Seagull; I booked late and the only seat they had was for the Saturday matinee. The run was sold out, largely due to the production’s design lessening the number of seats.
This year, every single one of the three Yale school if drama thesis projects was done with the audience in bleachers on the university theater stage. Any designer who still thinks this is a quirky choice, there you are. Perhaps some brave student someday will make the daring decision to let the audience sit in the actual auditorium, where there are many more seats. I’m sure the theater management students would applaud such a choice.
Limiting the size of the audience has a greater effect when the script is a popular or notorious one, and this year’s slated of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Cymbeline and The Seagull all qualify. In the case of The Seagull, director Alexandru Mihail already has a rabbits fan club due to his Yale Cabaret productions of Chekhov’s The Wedding Party and Bergman’s Persona.
The Seagull’s a particular favorite of the School of Drama, spanning several regimes. The school’s preeminent directing instructor of the late 20th century, Earl Gister, was a brilliant interpreter of Chekhov. Paul Schmidt, whose translation is being used in this production, was another steady champion of the playwright. I recall a vivid, pastel-pretty production directed by then- student Mahayana Landowne in late 1990s. It turns up regularly in scenework and student workshops.
The reason for the frequency is obvious. It’s a play about theater types having trouble relating top the real world, and vice versa. Within the artistic subset of this summer- home- and- surrounding- village ensemble, there are arguments about tradition versus progress, much like those in Chekhov’ s The Cherry Orchard
except regarding creative works rather than urban planning.
Mihail’s production of The wedding Reception, though modem and experimental in all sorts of exciting interactive and improvisational ways, was nonetheless period- set and traditional in terms of seeing and context and costumes. His Seagull, On the other hand, has a pre- show score of new wave pop music and a closing burst of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division. There are ongoing projections on the walls of the sitting-room setting which make the otherwise naturalistic scenic design into a fishbowl in an art gallery. We see raindrops, snow, a foraging deer, gigantic images of boiling water which look like static on a TV screen…
There are such abstractions aplenty throughout the show. The title fowl (deceased) is sketched on the floor in chalk. The tree around which frustrated symbolist playwright Konstantin Treplev builds his makeshift outdoor stage descends right into that central sitting room from the heavens.
Most stridently, the embittered Konstantin remains onstage for the entire performance, reacting to scenes he is not on and overhearing confidences he is not, in the script as written, privy to. This bold concept, similar to the one used last year in Gordon Edelstein’s production of The Glass Menagerie at Long Wharf, works surprisingly well. Only a few times did I think to myself “Shouldn’t Constantine be off burning a manuscript somewhere?”
This is a balanced, centered and clearly spoken production, which are the easy stuff to take care of when doing Chekhov. Mihail does the tough stuff too, though. He makes things lively—when people fall ill or fall in love, they smack together. Walking sticks rattle on the ground. Chairs tumble over. The stage is messy, as befits such a scattered group of jealous and love-starved malcontents.
Oh, and that overused idea of using the stage as the auditorium? Best use of that format I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen DOZENS of shows while seated on the UT stage. The first image you have of The Seagull is of that auditorium, as the backdrop for a show which comments constantly on the different needs and priorities of art and life. When Nina (Jillian Taylor) rushes off to follow her dream of being a big-city actress, you see her fleeing in the distance down the aisles of the University Theatre, among all those velvety red chairs. When the theater itself isn’t needed as an image, the many projections take over. The show is eerie, supernatural in how it changes forms to fit the conflicting consciousnesses of its key characters.
But the technology does not overwhelm. The best jabs at conventional theater (and there are many, making this a most modern-seeming century-old melodrama) are the most human ones: Brenda Meaney perpetually poised and “on” as the aging actress Arkadina, The fiery agitprop attitude of Konstantin.
The cast has the usual college-production Chekhov concern of having to portray three generations of townsfolks when all the performers are in the 20s. They overcome this by punching up the familiarity which they have developed as classmates. Indeed, several of the most infatuated characters, the ones with the most repressions and unrequitednesses, are portrayed by the very same people who were so uninhibited and brazenly sexual in the “camp” sequence of the purposely provocative Yale Cabaret production of Wallace Shawn’s A Though in Three Parts last semester. Yes, this demonstrates the actors’ range, but it also made me think of Shawn’s work as a present-day reaction to the withheld emotions of Chekhov. Fascinating to see the same cast in both. Carmen Zilles, Masha in Seagull and a similarly mistreated lustful character in A Thought in Three Parts, is conveys all kinds of romance while wrapped in the drabbest peasant clothes.
“What we need is new forms of theater!,” Konstantin says early on the play. Later, there’s talk of “a chaos of images and dreams” (You know, Paul Schmidt’s translation really is brilliant.) These things are actually achieved in Alexandru Mihail’s production of The Seagull, and it soars above the problematic staging of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Yale Rep just a few months ago. Faced with some of the same desires to let the script play out clearly and naturally yet allow for modern-day theatrical technology, Three Sisters kept the audience at a distance. The Seagull draws the crowd in and dazzles.