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 for the first time during a recent performance as a curiously prosaic way to announce death–the fact is–as though 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), all included that strange little phrase. It made me wonder what the Russian was. Why "the fact is" rather than a more stately "the truth is," say, or even "actually," which though mundane would get to the point faster?
Stoppard, in an introduction to the published edition of his version, is briefly witty on the subject of such niceties. He’s amusing on the subject of Masha’s famous line, for instance. Quoting the translation by George Calderon ("I’m in mourning for my life. I am unhappy") used in the play’s first-ever English performance, at Glasgow’s Royal Theater in 1909, Stoppard writes:
"I’m" and "I am:" the translator’s mill grinds exceeding small...
But such things are important. I once heard an actor in the UK argue that you could pretty much gauge the caliber of a production of The Seagull on how the actress playing Masha had been directed to play this very line. "Everyone always thinks Masha is being serious and ‘Chekhovian’ when she’s being flippant," he said and illustrated–snapping out, "I’m in mourning for my life!" so that she meant only, "Go away and leave me alone, you tiresome fool!" The text bears him out, I think. No one would follow up such a pronouncement with "I am unhappy" unless they were relenting, apologizing for a moment of shrewishness.
There’s a third thing that people who have seen The Seagull at one time or another could be expected to remember, and that is all the title-related imagery. It’s relentless, unbearable, 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, confiding her feelings of identification with the bird. Then Konstantin makes it concrete: midway through Act II he lays the body of a gull he has just shot at her feet. Not long after, seeing it there, Trigorin begins making notes for a plot that prefigures the callous relationship he is about to 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 from Konstantin the trajectory of her fate 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, like a trophy. Trigorin doesn’t remember a thing about it.
One of the lovely things about Nichols’ production is the painless way all this bird business seems to flit by without drama or fuss. So light and quick is the director’s touch that we scarcely notice the avoirdupois of the symbolism.
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, in the Times, gave the production a "mixed" review, but really this was just the Times critic being polite. (Ordinary folk who experienced the production as a travesty seem to feel Brantley had got it right.) 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, and that it derives more from history and the circumstances under which Chekhov’s work arrived in America than it does from either stage-sense or literary sensibility.
American views of Chekhov are largely informed by a misconception formed on the occasion of the Moscow Art Theater’s first visit to America in 1923 (and handed down from one generation of professional intellectuals to another), that the way the MAT did Chekhov was the right way to do it. The MAT, after all, was Chekhov’s own company and Stanislavsky’s. In fact, by 1923 the Moscow Art Theater was on its last legs, a petrified Soviet version of itself, desperate for money and without any artistic leadership at all. In reality, the American tour was part of a huge and aggressively hyped p.r. stunt; the company’s brilliant heyday–which was never all that brilliant to begin with–had ended more than 10 years before the revolution. Nevertheless, at that time a link was forged in the American mind between Chekhov and the version of Stanislavsky that some of his ambitious would-be disciples began to teach and in lectures that toute influential New York flocked to. It was a style that saw Chekhov’s characters as they view each other, or as they say they do.
Typically, therefore, in American productions of The Seagull Nina has been cast and played as Konstantin sees her–lovely and nubile, a fairy princess locked away in her tower–while Konstantin has been played as a loser and self-involved crybaby because that is his mother’s perception. 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 it’s a play about theater and how theater should be made, revolve around the discrepancies between human perceptions of reality and human depictions of it. Practically everyone in the play is either a commentator on life (like Sorin, Masha, Medvedenko) or on art (like the doctor and Sorin’s estate manager Shamaev) or someone who (like Arkadina, Trigorin, Konstantin and Nina) tries to make a living depicting it.
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 is neither overbearing nor monstrously flamboyant but charmingly so, and Kevin Kline’s Trigorin is utterly enchanting–we’re fairly bombarded with the charm Konstantin claims to be unable to detect. As Shamrayev, the estate manager, and his wife Polina, John Goodman and Debra Monk seem underused, but everyone else is achieving the very kind of transcendence that The Seagull, more than any other of Chekhov’s plays, is fundamentally about. As Masha and Sorin, on the face of it the play’s two unhappiest characters, Marcia Gay Harden and Christopher Walken are funny enough to be drawing exit ovations. It’s a chance to see in full flower the wit that’s always lurked beneath Walken’s performances.
Popular opinion has it that Streep and Kline are giving the take-home performances, but what blew me away was Philip Seymour Hoffman’s restrained and studiously untiresome Konstantin. Not only is he most assuredly not an asshole, but up until the end he seems like the most stable character in the piece, and even when he begins to teeter it’s without any whisper of whining. This is Treplev-as-Chekhov more than Treplev-as-Hamlet.
Of course, Konstantin-the-experimental-playwright-turned-fiction-writer is only one of three portraits of himself that Chekhov was drawing. There’s also Dorn who, like Chekhov, is a doctor, and Trigorin who, after all, writes the kinds of short stories that Chekhov wrote. (Stoppard notes in his introduction that at one point Trigorin speaks–inexplicably–like a playwright.) One of the things this production acknowledges so beautifully is 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 reality itself. Rather than capitalize on the production’s outdoor setting at the Delacorte, he has constructed a breathtaking vista of artificial trees and landscaping with an ivy-covered structure that draws attention to its very fakery. Which is precisely what Chekhov was trying to do.
The play–which was famously a flop in its first production, before the MAT got its hands on it–was Chekhov’s demonstration that you could take all the conventional elements of melodrama, from youth defiled and too-full-figured 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 portray life exactly as it is that has made so much Chekhov–and in a previous era, so much American acting–so boring for so many years.
The Seagull, through Aug. 26 at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, 79th St. (midpark). Tickets are free, but are only available day of show during limited hours. For more information, call 539-8750 or visit www.publictheater.org.
