Flying High

ON October 17th, 1896, when the first production of The Seagull opened in the State Theater of St. Petersburg, it was a resounding disaster. The play was poorly understood by its actors and poorly acted. Hissed down by the audience, it was dismissed by critics as inept and absurd Playwright Anton Chekhov, confounded by the disaster, left the theater after the second act, vowing never to write a play again.

Luckily, one member of the audience saw potential in the play, and mounted a second production. Critic-playwright Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko was at that time organizing the Moscow Art Theater with a partner and talked Chekhov into giving The Seagull a second chance. Their 1898 production of the play proved an enormous critical and commercial success, and led to the collaboration that established the Art Theater as one of the most prestigious in the world. It also inspired Chekhov to write his three greatest dramatic masterpieces. Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard.

As the fate of The Seagull suggests, the very nature of Chekhov's art has often made his plays difficult to produce. Critic Keith Neilson has noted that Chekhov saw reality not as a series of dramatic climaxes, but as a mundane process of day-to-day living in which the crucial events happen unobtrusively in the background. Thus, though The Seagull includes a failed and successful suicide, a seduction, an abandonment, and the death of an infant, all of these melodramas occur offstage--mostly between the third and fourth acts. What we are shown instead is the residue of these events, the effect each incident has on the characters.

Checkhov's paring away of the essential elements of the plot contains the germ of his genius, but it can also make dramatic tension difficult to sustain. As all attention is focused on the actors, it is sometimes difficult to retain audience interest through the lengthy and introspective soliloquies.

BILL RAUCH meets and overcomes this challenge by employing an experimental trick of staging. Seating the audience on the small Agassiz stage, Rauch stages the play in the theatre itself.

For many plays such an inversion would undoubtedly prove disastrous, but in this case it not only matches Chekhov's mood and theme, but carries the playwright's own actions one step further. Chekhov boils the play's plot down to a bare minimum; Rauch abandons the scenery as well. We are left with the bare essence: a group of men and women struggling vainly to communicate with each other and to cope with their loves, their art, and their lives.

Set on a Russian country estate in two successive summers, the play is built around a series of love triangles. The young writer Constantine Treplev is hopelessly in love with the young and beautiful would-be actress Nina Zarechny. But Nina--the Seagull--is infatuated with Boris Trigorin, the famous novelist and lover of the actress Irina Arkadina. Constantine's mother. At the same time, Masha, the daughter of the estate manager, is deeply and futilely in love with Constantine, though she herself is loved by the local schoolteacher. As these characters work out their separate fates, the play explores the relationship of men and women and the role of the artist in modern society.

The use of the theater as a stage proves doubly successful in underlining another theme of the play: The difficulty or absence of communication between men and women. Not only does the size of the theater dwarf and separate the characters (Rauch, however, uses the space very evenly), but the rows of seats provide frustrating barriers between them. Characters, unable to make themselves heard or understood, race down aisles, violently pushing up the seats in their frustration. Not only does this express what words cannot, but it builds a frenzy of tension and frustration. In one particularly evocative scene. Nina and Constantine--reunited after a lengthy separation--survey an entire section of chairs with the seats pushed up. Eventually, they move to the bottom row, and each pulls down one seat at opposite ends.

The danger of using such an experimental setting--particularly in a play like Chekhov's--is that the form will overshadow the characters. In this production, however, the acting is uniformly so powerful that the characters rise above their setting, letting it serve only as a backdrop for their individual tensions. Peter Howard brilliantly captures Constantine's internal agitation; Claudia Silver is dazzling in her portrayal of his vain, cruel, but basically insecure mother; and Molly White plays the brooding and morose Masha with frightening conviction. Nina Bernstein as Nina Zarechny and Benajah Cobb as the old writer Trigorin are also superb.

Ironically, Chekhov's genius lies in his ability to communicate the inability to communicate. Rauch's production not only captures this haunting theme, but--by putting the audience on stage, and the stage in the audience--suggests that the loneliness and isolation of Chekhov's characters is all too real.