‘The Seagull’
I have always found it difficult to work up much sympathy for Mme. Ranevskaya, Chekhov’s best-known heroine, inexplicably moping around about having to sell the family’s cherry orchard and move to an apartment in Paris. How, I still ask myself, could living in Paris be considered a hardship?
But The Seagull is another breed of play entirely: the topics under consideration here are art and love rather than money and property. And if you feel disoriented by entering the theater through a side door, you’ll be right in step with some of the characters, equally off-kilter but for a different reason.
Chekhov could easily have made this a farce (he does call it a comedy) because it concerns a merry-go-round of love: four people in love with people who are in love with other people. It also features actors and writers – always easy targets for comedy. And all of them will spend a significant amount of time together at a country estate.
UCSD Theatre presents Chekhov’s The Seagull through February 27 at the Mandell Weiss Forum Theatre. Tom Dugdale, third-year MFA candidate in directing, helms the production.
Dugdale takes a musician’s approach to the play, seeing it in terms of rhythm and phrasing, and in fact adds a few original songs (by David Corsello, Daniel Rubiano and the company) and instrumentals.
The dichotomy between “pure” art and commercial success in theater is represented by Konstantin (Patrick Riley), the young playwright who wants to invent new dramatic forms, and Trigorin (Gabriel Lawrence), the hack who’s got the salable formula down.
Konstantin’s mother Irina (Cate Campbell) is an established actress who tries to keep her youthful image intact by hiding her 25-year-old son in the country, where her name is less likely to be tied to his.
As for love, The Seagull is a complete jumble. Irina, who calls Konstantin’s writing “avant-garde raving,” has taken Trigorin as her lover. Trogorin is attracted to the young actress Nina (Zoë Chao), who wants to be “spectacularly famous.” Masha (Taylor Shurte), daughter of the estate’s manager, always wears black, is “in mourning for my life,” and is fixated on Konstantin, who is crazy about Nina.
Are you dizzy yet? Never mind. Relax, enjoy the vitality and fine acting of this production and its arguments about the nature and function of theater, and be glad that Chekhov has finally been moved from the “downer Russian” shelf to his rightful place as a sharp observer of the human animal.
The Seagull plays through February 27, 2010 at the Mandell Weiss Forum Theatre at UCSD. Shows Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m. For tickets call (858) 534-4574 or buy at the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre on campus.
The cast of UCSD Theatre's 'The Seagull.' Photo by Manuel Rotenberg.
