Review of reviews: Stage

The Seagull

Classic Stage Company

New York

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**

Anton Chekhov called the first of his four major masterpieces a “comedy,” said Hilton Als in The New Yorker. But productions of The Seagull are seldom lighthearted. The play’s “explicit subject” is grief, as rendered through the failed expectations and delusions of a group of 19th-century Russian provincials. It’s a difficult play to pull off, requiring a commanding “feel for the interiors of Chekhov’s distinctly Russian characters.” Arkadina, the aging diva played here by Dianne Wiest, and her novelist boy-toy Trigorin, played by Alan Cumming, make a summer pilgrimage to a country estate. There, Arkadina’s son, Konstantin, and his inamorata, Nina, are staging a play. Jealousy, frustration, and absurdity ensue in uniquely Chekhovian fashion.

Director Viacheslav Dolgachev ought to have a feel for this material, said John Simon in Bloomberg.com. His pedigree, after all, includes a decade at Chekhov’s old stamping ground, the venerable Moscow Art Theater. But Dolgachev shoots unforgivably wide of the target, “overemphasizing and underlining subtle things right and left” while ignoring the fundamentals. As Konstantin and Nina, Ryan O’Nan and Kelli Garner show promise. Cumming restrains his usual effete self-indulgence enough to make a solid Trigorin, though he’d do well to lay off the excessive “eyeball-rolling and hair-smoothing.” But Wiest, usually a solid performer, misses “the sacred-monster grandioseness of the prima donna,” and Dolgachev destroys the mood by making his actors race around the stage “like circus horses.”

The director needs to learn to let his actors be, said Michael Feingold in The Village Voice. He seems to be tinkering here as if the play were still in rehearsal. And he needs to learn to trust the words as Chekhov wrote them. This Seagull only works when the actors are able to deliver their lines simply—and that’s about a third of the time. “The play comes through, but in a bruised and batted form that won’t win Chekhov many new admirers.”