Everyone remembers two things about The Seagull, the first lines and the last. “Why do you always wear black?” the dull schoolmaster, Medvedenko, asks Masha at the top of the show. “I’m in mourning for my life,” she replies. Even people who have never seen or read the play seem to know this exchange, just as they seem to remember that The Seagull is the Chekhov play that ends with the words “Konstantin’s shot himself.”
What Dorn says sotto voce to Trigorin at the end of Tom Stoppard’s version of the play—the one being used in the Mike Nichols production currently running in Central Park—is “The fact is he’s shot himself.” Konstantin has already tried to commit suicide once before in the play. Still, it struck me during a recent performance as a curiously prosaic way to announce death—“The fact is…”—as if the doctor were correcting someone on a minor point of bureaucratic procedure. I later checked all the translations I could get my hands on and found that, while each chose a different permutation of Treplev’s name, which Stoppard leaves out entirely, they all included that strange little phrase.
Stoppard, in an introduction to the published edition of his version, is briefly witty on the subject of translation. He quotes the version of Masha’s opening line used in a the play’s first-ever English performance at Glasgow’s Royal Theater in 1909 (“I’m in mourning for my life. I am unhappy.”)
“I’m” and “I am”: the translator’s mill grinds exceeding small…”
There’s a third thing that people who have seen The Seagull at one time or another can be expected to remember, which is all the eponymous imagery. It’s plodding and relentless, the only time Chekhov ever seems to have descended into Ibsenity. First Nina spells it out for us in an early love scene with Konstantin: she confides her feelings of identification with the bird. Midway through Act II, Konstantin makes it concrete, laying the body of a gull he has just shot at Nina’s feet. Not long after, Trigorin, seeing it there, begins making notes that prefigure the callous relationship he will soon embark on with Nina:
Idea for a story—young girl, like you, brought up on the shores of a lake. She loves the lake like a seagull and is happy and free just like a seagull. Then a man happens to come along, he sees her, and having nothing much to do, destroys her, like this seagull. (Stoppard’s version)
Still later, when Nina’s ruin is complete—just after we’ve heard the trajectory of her fate from Konstantin, and shortly before the end of the play—we learn that Trigorin had asked Masha’s father to have the gull Konstantin shot stuffed and mounted. But Trigorin doesn’t remember a thing about it. He has forgotten all about the seagull.
One of the lovely things about Nichols’ production is the painless way all this bird business seems to flit by without focus or fuss. So light is his touch that we’re barely allowed to note, let alone dwell on it.
Since the play went up last month, it has inspired two antithetical reactions, loathing and bliss, representative, I think, of opposing notions on how Chekhov should be performed. Ben Brantley gave the production a “mixed” review, but really this was just the Times critic being polite. Brantley likes his Chekhov gloomy. He’s indicated as much, faulting other productions for mining the material for comedy. I happen to think this view wrong-headed, that it derives more from history and the circumstances under which Chekhov’s work first arrived in America than it does from either stage-sense or literary sensibility.
Our views of Chekhov are largely shaped by a misconception that crystallized in the minds of American intellectuals on the occasion of the Moscow Art Theater’s first visit to America in 1923: that the way the MAT did Chekhov was the right way to do it. This notion was handed down from one generation of professional intellectuals to another. And why not? It seemed to make sense. The MAT, after all, was Chekhov’s own company; if anybody ought to know how to do Chekhov, it would be Stanislavsky.
Actually, by 1923 the Moscow Art Theater was on its last legs, a petrified Soviet version of its former self. The company’s brilliant heyday had ended more than ten years before the Revolution. By the 1920s, the company was desperate for money, and the American tour part of a last-gasp attempt to stave off financial collapse. What New Yorkers saw was a company long past its prime performing a decades-old repertoire. At the same time, artists and intellectuals were flocking to lectures and classes, where some of Stanislavsky’s more ambitious would-be disciples were promulgating ideas that he himself had long since either lost interest in or repudiated.
In any case, Chekhov was frequently and famously at odds with Stanislavsky over the latter’s approach to his plays, which took at face value what Chekhov’s characters have to say about each other. It’s essentially this approach that has come down to us, a style that seeks to align itself with the way the characters in the Chekhov’s plays themselves view the world.
Thus, in American productions of The Seagull Nina is typically cast and played in such a way as to make her seem to us as Konstantin sees her—fragile and spiritual, a beautiful fairy princess locked away in her tower—while Konstantin is usually played as the self-involved crybaby and loser that his mother perceives him to be. This doesn’t make for a very interesting or textured theatrical experience.
Nor is it really in keeping with the literary concerns of the play, which (inasmuch as The Seagull is about theater and how theater should be made) revolve around the discrepancy between human perceptions of reality and human depictions of it. Practically everyone in the play is either a commentator on life (like Sorin, Masha, and Medvedenko), a commentator on art (like the doctor and Sorin’s estate manager, Shamaev), or someone who tries to depict life with art (like Arkadina, Trigorin, Konstantin and Nina).
The current production presents these characters as we’ve rarely seen them. Natalie Portman’s Nina is breathtakingly ordinary, a plain little thing with no visible soul or passion and a tendency to belch nervous laughter. Meryl Streep’s Arkadina does not appear to us as Konstantin sees her—overbearing and monstrously flamboyant. She’s theatrical, but only in the most poised and civilized way, while Kevin Kline’s Trigorin is utterly enchanting. We’re fairly bombarded with the charm that Konstantin claims to be unable to detect. John Goodman and Debra Monk seem underused as Shamrayev and his wife, Polina, but everyone else is achieving the very kind of transcendence that The Seagull, more than any other of Chekhov’s plays, is fundamentally about.
Word on the street is Kline and Streep are giving the take-home performances. Perhaps. But Marcia Gay Harden and Christopher Walken, as Masha and Sorin—the play’s two most miserable characters, on the face of it—are funny enough to be drawing exit ovations. What really blew me away, though, was Philip Seymour Hoffman’s restrained and studiously untiresome Konstantin. Not only is he most assuredly not a loser, he seems like the most stable character in the piece—almost right up until the end, and even when he begins to teeter it’s without any whisper of a whine. This is Treplev-as-Chekhov more than Treplev-as-Hamlet.
Of course Konstantin, the experimental playwright turned fiction writer, is only one of three self-portraits that Chekhov was drawing in The Seagull. There’s also Dorn—like Chekhov a doctor—and Trigorin who, after all, writes the kinds of short stories that Chekhov wrote himself. (Stoppard notes in his introduction that at one point Trigorin speaks—inexplicably—like a playwright.)
It’s one of the virtues of this production that it manages to convey (quite beautifully) the play’s relation to reality—which is essentially contrarian. Bob Crowley’s Act I set is both a symphony of non-realism and an ostentatious refusal to use the reality he has been given. Rather than capitalize on the outdoor setting at the Delacorte, he has constructed a breathtaking vista of artificial trees and landscaping that draws attention to its very fakery. Which is precisely what Chekhov was trying to do.
The play was Chekhov’s demonstration that you could take all the conventional elements of melodrama, from youth defiled and too-robust imagery to the final offstage gunshot—and make of it something that wasn’t melodrama but wasn’t realism either. For Chekhov that stuffed bird isn’t Nina, it’s art itself, made into a lifeless trophy through the very sort of misguided attempt to recreate life exactly as it is that has made so much Chekhov so boring for so many years.