The Flight of The Seagull

Love and Art
As opening exchanges go, it’s hard to beat the first two lines of The Seagull:

MEDVEDENKO: Why do you always wear black?
MASHA: I’m in mourning for my life. I’m unhappy.

[CMP:R]She ain’t the only one. In Chekhov’s slice-of-country-life, which he dared to call “a comedy in four acts,” there’s enough unrequited love to fuel a season of Gossip Girl: Boring teacher Medvedenko is crazy about Masha the estate manager’s tart-tongued daughter, who’s besotted with aspiring playwright Konstantin, who’s obsessed with would-be actress Nina, who’s enthralled with acclaimed writer Trigorin, who’s ensnared with famous actress Arkadina the imperious mother of Konstantin. And that’s just the main characters. There’s also Masha’s mom Polina, who wants to run off with dapper Dr. Dorn. Whew!

The first of Chekhov’s quartet of now-classic plays followed by Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull is irresistible to actors for its juicy roles—not to mention the play’s thoroughly modern meditation on the pursuit of fame and the future of the theater. “We need new forms,” Konstantin declares just before Nina performs his play-within-the play about the universal soul, “and if there are none to be had, we’d be better off with nothing at all.”

But if The Seagull is universally hailed as a masterpiece today, its first performance at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg on October 17, 1896, was nothing less than a disaster. As Chekhov wrote to a friend: “Everyone assured me that all my characters were idiots, from the dramatic point of view my play was clumsy, crass, unintelligible, even senseless, and so on and on in that vein. You can imagine my state of mind, faced with disaster on a scale I had never dreamed of.... My thought was that if I had really written and produced a play so obviously crammed with hideous defects, I must have lost whatever sensitivity I ever possessed, and therefore the engine of my creativity must have suffered terminal collapse.”

How did The Seagull go from a laughingstock to one of the hottest Broadway tickets in the fall of 2008?

All About Anton
Before turning his attention to the stage, Anton Chekhov was a celebrated short story writer and practicing physician. “Medicine is my lawful wedded wife,” he wrote to his best friend and literary editor, Alexey Suvorin, in 1888, “and literature is my mistress. When I’ve had enough of one, I can go and spend the night with the other.”

Chekhov’s artistic achievements become doubly awe-inspiring considering his humble beginnings and chronic ill health. The third of six surviving children of a former serf who managed to become the owner of a grocery store, Anton was born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, a small town in southern Russia. He and his siblings endured their father’s physical abuse, a subject Anton never wrote about directly but used as he did most events in his life in his fiction.

The Chekhov family moved to Moscow when the grocery failed, though Anton stayed behind to finish his schooling. By the time he was 25, he was supporting the entire clan by turning out humorous sketches and short stories. He earned his medical degree at about the same time but never earned his living as a doctor, treating the poor without being paid. Chekhov himself suffered from tuberculosis his entire adult life but preferred not to dwell on his illness.

Although the fiercely private Chekhov resisted writing autobiographical sketches, he left reams of material for future biographers in the form of nearly 5,000 published letters, with 7,000 others addressed to him archived at the Russian State Library. One can only imagine what Chekhov’s output might have been in the e-mail age !, but the letters themselves would make a hell of a blog, as he shares his thoughts on life and art with an array of family members, colleagues, friends and fans. His honesty and lack of pretension make his letters as fresh and interesting today as a century ago.

Photos of Chekhov show him to be rakishly handsome, with a neat beard and a steady gaze. He enjoyed plenty of female companionship over the years and mulled the complexities of romantic love in his stories and plays but waited to marry until 1901, when we wed Olga Knipper, an actress at the Moscow Art Theatre. In just five years, they exchanged 800 letters! Three years after their wedding, on July 2, 1904, Chekhov died in Germany at the tragically young age of 44—reportedly draining a glass of champagne on his deathbed.

The Path of The Seagull
Chekhov dashed off his first play, Ivanov, on commission in less than two weeks in 1887, followed a year later by The Wood Demon. Neither was a huge success, but the response pales in comparison with the vitriol that rained down during and after the disastrous first performance of The Seagull in 1896.

As Janet Malcolm explains in her fascinating book Reading Chekhov, the playwright was set up for failure because The Seagull’s first performance was a benefit for a beloved comic actress named E.I. Levkeeva, with an audience made up of her fans. They expected an evening of hilarity and became outraged when presented a less-than-sunny Symbolist drama. The celebrated actress playing Nina became so flustered by the booing that she lost her voice in the middle of the show. Though the second night audience behaved better, a dejected Chekhov didn’t stick around to see it, writing to his pal Suvorin, “Never again will I write plays or have them staged.”

Luckily, Moscow Art Theatre director Constantin Stanislavski famed later as the father of “method” acting understood the subtleties in The Seagull and staged the play to acclaim in 1898, going on to commission and present Chekhov’s later works as well. The playwright had attended rehearsals before leaving for Yalta, where he moved for his health, and was delighted with The Seagull’s reception in Moscow. “Your success proves once again that audiences and actors alike need intelligent theatre,” he wrote to a friend associated with the production.

So, which character in The Seagull is based on Anton? Trigorin, the traditional writer, and Konstantin, the rebellious playwright, “personify two aspects of Chekhov,” biographer Donald Rayfield explains, “one the analytical follower of Turgenev and Tolstoy, the other the visionary prose-poet.” Dr. Dorn, who fends off women while dispensing no-nonsense medical advice, is also a lot like his creator.

Chekhov rather naughtily drew on real-life incidents in the play, including a medallion he received from a deluded admirer that referenced a line in one of his stories: “If you ever need my life, come and take it.” The lovesick Nina gives that very present to Trigorin, triggering their affair. The Trigorin/Nina/Konstantin relationship echoes that of a journalist friend of Chekhov and an amateur actress, with Anton as the third wheel. And symbolism abounds, with overt references to Hamlet and covert jabs at Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and Turgenev’s A Month in the Country.

Bird on Broadway
The current production of The Seagull is the eighth Broadway mounting since 1916 of a play that has drawn such illustrious names as Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in 1938, with Uta Hagen as Nina, Eva Le Gallienne performing her own translation in a 1964 production that lasted 16 performances and the peculiar combination of Tyne Daly Arkadina, Jon Voight Trigorin, Ethan Hawke Konstantin, Laura Linney Nina and Tony Roberts Dr. Dorn in a 1992 production from Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre.

Away from Broadway, the all-star team of Meryl Streep Arkadina, Kevin Kline Trigorin, Philip Seymour Hoffman Konstantin, Natalie Portman Nina, Christopher Walken Sorin and Marcia Gay Harden Masha starred in a 2001 Central Park production directed by Mike Nichols and translated by Tom Stoppard. Only last winter, Dianne Wiest and Alan Cumming tackled the play for Classic Stage Company in a production staged by a former director of the Moscow Art Theater. The critical reaction to all three major New York productions of the past two decades has been, at best, mixed.

Now comes Kristin Scott Thomas headlining Ian Rickson’s widely hailed production, featuring many of the actors she performed alongside at London’s Royal Court Theater. And anticipation is high among Chekhov lovers who have never seen a riveting Seagull. The truth is, The Seagull is maddeningly difficult to pull off because there’s so much subtext; the actors must meld into a seamless ensemble to convey the play’s ideas and conflicts—plus, a lot of stuff happens offstage!

But for those who love the theater, a great production of a play about writers and actors, about ambition and celebrity, about mothers and sons, about falling in love and aging, is definitely worth the wait.