There is always room for Anton Chekhov in the theatrical season. Plays such as Uncle Vanya, Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters remain relevant and timeless. And, The Seagull became the first of the great Chekhov quartet of plays when it premiered in 1896. It stands out for rendering complex psychological profiles of characters — notably artists who suffer for their respective highbrow and middlebrow aesthetics and sensibilities.
With its artistic brand for picking exceptionally well-written plays, The Sting and Honey Company has mounted a very smart production of The Seagull, using the Tom Stoppard translation. With solid acting across the board, the production, directed by Javen Tanner, nicely shines the spotlight on the play’s comedic potential without zealously ramping up the inevitable tragedy of its psychological drama. The run continues through Sept. 28 in the Regent Street Black Box at The Eccles Theatre in downtown Salt Lake City.
Actors Trayven Call (as Konstantin Treplieff) and Javen Tanner (as Trigorin) do an excellent job, in characters that are equally obsessed with trying to channel their respective frustrations through their literary work while desperately trying to find self-actualization in their physical and romantic well-being. It was Chekhov’s The Seagull that cemented the trope of the tortured artist most effectively.
The play’s conflicts of love drive each of the four acts. From the moment on Sorin’s estate when Konstantin proclaims his love for Nina (played by Ryann Bailey) to the fact that despite Trigorin had abandoned her, she is still devoted to him, Konstantin’s mental well-being sinks deeper into an inevitable abyss.
The nuanced dry humor in The Seagull arises naturally from the love triangles: Konstantin must have Nina, who loves Trigorin, the man whom Irina also has set her eyes on, and then there’s Masha (played by Suni Gigliotti) who has eyes for Konstantin, and, finally, the hapless Medvedenko (played by Alvaro Cortez).
Call successfully draws the important contrast with his artistic counterpoint. Konstantin can never escape the shadows of his mother’s status as a celebrity (Irina Arkadina, played wonderfully by Deena Marie Manzanares) or the popularity of Trigorin’s writings in literary circles. Konstantin epitomizes the struggles of the Russian symbolism movement of the 19th century when it sought to gain traction. It was primarily a highly theoretical construct that at times sought to emulate the likes of Oscar Wilde, Ibsen, Wagner and even Nietzsche.
The admittedly incomprehensible abstract play within a play that opens The Seagull draws derision from his mother and the premiere performance is abruptly cut off by the interruptions of the audience. But, it is Nina’s criticism that hurts Konstantin the most. She says it is inconceivable that his play has no living characters, to which he responds that “Life must be represented not as it is, but as it ought to be; as it appears in dreams.” Later, after Konstantin has achieved a modicum of success in his literary pursuits, it is Trigorin who says that Konstantin still cannot find the right groove in his expressive capabilities. Trigorin says that Konstantin’s work is so vague that it borders on delirium, which is why he is unable to create memorable living characters.
He is hopelessly stuck in neutral: the relationship with his mother is unmovable, as she will never offer even a scintilla of approval. Konstantin laments that his mother prefers what he sees as vulgar and profane in the art of the theater. Call handles the passage skillfully: “When the curtain rises on that little three-walled room, when those mighty geniuses, those high-priests of art, show us people in the act of eating, drinking, loving, walking, and wearing their coats, and attempt to extract a moral from their insipid talk; when playwrights give us under a thousand different guises the same, same, same old stuff, then I must need run from it, as Maupassant ran from the Eiffel Tower that was about to crush him by its vulgarity.”
Earlier in the story, Konstantin resorted to desperate measures to win Nina’s affection — shooting and injuring himself and offering a dead gull. When Trigorin sees the dead bird, which has totally put off Nina, he muses about writing a short story about its symbolism. Meanwhile, Konstantin is so psychologically broken and extremely sensitive to any mockery or critique that Trigorin’s sly bits of mockery inflict more damage on Konstantin’s psyche, which already has been so compromised by his profound inferiority complex.
In his director’s note, Tanner chooses Sylvia Plath’s Mad Girl’s Love Song, a poem that is a perfect parallel to the play. This explains beautifully and succinctly the objective of this particular production’s treatment of the play. While we often speak of someone madly in love, rarely do we contextualize it as a possibility of a mad person in love. Take, for instance, the repeated alternating lines that end each stanza in Plath’s poem: “(I think I made you up inside my head.)” or “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.” Note the first line always appears after the woman in the poem speaks to her lover while the second line comes whenever she believes her world is disintegrating.
Considering the poem for anchoring the elements seen on stage, the cadence and rhythm in this production are properly chosen. Plath’s putting that first line in parentheses is significant, which matches up with what is happening whenever Konstantin is talking to Nina. This is where his insecurity and inferiority are most evident, and we see this as the moment where Konstantin is questioning reality to the extent that we actually see his supposedly unrequited love for Nina as an outright fabrication. But, in the poem — as in the play — the repeating pattern is broken in the final section, where the reality and the subject identity of the love collapse into one, consequently confirming that Konstantin is unshakeably beholden to one absurdity over the other. Like the thunderbird in Plath’s poem, Chekhov’s seagull is actually the one solid, real entity for Konstantin.
Rounding out the ensemble are equally solid performances in fine Chekhov style by Stephen Williams (Sorin), Will Mortensen (Yakov), Polina (Krisha Deaver), Dorn (Cam Deaver) and Shamraev (Bijan Hosseini, who also is assistant director of the production).
For more information, see the Sting and Honey website.