Playwright: Anton Chekhov
At: Writers' Theatre,
325 Tudor Court in Glencoe
Phone: (847) 242-6000; $45-$55
Runs through: Dec. 5
The plot is 19th-century soap at its sudsiest: Irina Arkadina, star of the Russian stage, keeps company with popular novelist Boris Trigorin, 15 years her junior. This relationship incites the disapproval of her son, Konstantin, himself a would-be playwright enamored of girl-next-door Nina. But Konstantin is the object of melancholy Masha's affections. She, in turn, distracts herself with poor but devoted Semyon. And then Nina goes fluttery over Boris, who sees in her a cure for his Writer's Block
Chekhov described his initial attempt at realistic depiction of human experience as, ironically, a 'comedy'. But while Life might shift from comic to tragic in the blink of an eye, a laughing audience is not easily quieted. And a plot that saves the Big Speeches for its very last moments demands that actors steeped in legendary accounts of its premiere production by the Moscow Art Theatre reserve their energies rather than plunge headlong into their roles. (In reality, the play premiered on a double bill with an actual comedy, the MAT production being a revival—but that's legend for you.) All these factors contribute to making The Seagull the most difficult of Chekhov's Greatest Hits to bring off successfully.
This Writer's Theatre show seems to be aiming somewhere between its play's ill-starred debut and its later triumph. Why else is Christopher McLinden's Konstantin done up to look like Harry Potter's gawky school chum, Karen Janes Woditsch's Masha as a stoop-shouldered GothChick and Susan Hart playing Irina in full Margo Channing mode? Did director Michael Halberstam, like Chekhov, underestimate the time necessary to slow the ambient tone from satirical artifice to weary despair? Whatever its inspiration, the results diminish our emotional investment as we watch these characters ruin their lives and those of everybody around them, so certain are we that a satisfying resolution to everyone's troubles will be forthcoming.
Karen Aldridge and Coby Goss, in defiance of their slippery concept, project dignity from the outset to redeem Nina and Boris. And James Leaming lends the avuncular Dr. Dorn a comforting presence. But Curt Columbus' freshly colloquial translation never fully integrates with the shallow characterizations and stilted phrasing of a cast still largely unsure of their dramatic universe.