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ABOUT THE SEAGULL: "The Seagull" embodies all that is the best and the worst about love. It is a play of dreamers, of theatre-people, of a hopeless desire to understand one's self while trying to be understood. It is common knowledge that when this play was written in 1898, Chekhov was hailed as the great naturalist playwright – tearing down all that was artificial. "The Seagull" became the cornerstone for naturalism in twentieth century theatre. But Chekhov was hailed by the Symbolists too. In a tradition dating back to Maeterlinck, and promoted by Madame Blatvatsky and her Theosophical Society, Symbolists believed in an imminent time when all surfaces would melt away, and a fourth dimension would reveal itself, making enlightenment possible. They believed that art could prepare people for this revelation; Chekhov made flesh this belief in every play he wrote. A saint to many, Chekhov is both the great naturalist and the great symbolist playwright. Both are true. To stage his work, without reflecting this dichotomy, is to be incomplete. The first act of "The Seagull" mocks symbolist techniques, using naturalism. But the last act of "The Seagull", repeating elements from act one, is a symbolist masterpiece. This production begins in a fanciful world of Treplev's mind's eye, inspired by the symbolic imagery of Edvard Munch and the turn of the nineteenth century's fascination with Japanese wood block prints. Trees made of pink and green rice paper expand the world of Treplev's imagination from "his little stage by the lake" to engulf all of the characters. As the play progresses, this symbolic world gives way to the real. By the last act, all of the designs of Treplev's mind are swept into a Beckettian trash heap in a corner; the real doors of the vast, empty real stage and the real work lights ARE the real room in which he finds himself. Everything in this play (designs, acting choices) is stripped down for this fourth act, so that we too are alone in his sea of entropy, left with just Nina's words, ". . . I know Kostya, it's not about fame or fortune or any of those things . . . it's knowing how to endure . . . and bear your cross . . . And I have faith now . . . and life is not so difficult anymore." The play ends with all surfaces melted away, and a new order revealed. |