Wings to fly

Clark's quasi-experimental Seagull pays off for its actors

by Steve Vineberg

THE SEAGULL By Anton Chekhov. by Stephen Mulrine. Directed by Raymond Munro. Sets designed by Derek Lane. Costumes by Christine Weinrobe. Lighting by Jeremy M. Goodman. With Siri Kaur Baruc, Joshua P.J. Duksin, Virginia Penta Munro, Albert Aeed, Molly Hale, Neil Schroeder, William Sigalis, John Macey, Richard Arum, Sasha Dobos-Czarnocha, and Travis Murray. At Clark University, through April 18.

The Seagull, the earliest of what we think of as Chekhov's four major works, has a lot in common with Ibsen's The Wild Duck. Both are realist plays built around insistent symbols, and as anyone who has worked on a production of either will tell you, these symbols -- a dead seagull shot by a melancholic young would-be writer and presented as a gloomy gift to the woman whose love he has lost to another man, and a duck tamed by an overly sensitive adolescent girl and housed in her attic -- aren't easy to pull off. (In the late '70s, Saturday Night Live offered a hilarious sketch in which Bill Murray, clad in Russian peasant garb as Chekhov's Treplev, lobbed a dead bird straight into Nina's -- Jane Curtin's -- lap.)

There's a reason for these unwieldy props: both plays are about highly conscious people who create symbols. In The Wild Duck, the tragedy of the child, Hedvig, is the result of a misunderstanding of how the adults around her are using symbols. Naively, she takes their words literally and makes a sacrifice no one intended her to make. The seagull is the means by which the two writers in Chekhov's play -- Treplev and Trigorin, the latter highly successful in artistic and his sexual endeavors (he sleeps with both Treplev's actress mother and his actress girlfriend) -- foreshadow the destruction that falls over the play in the final act. Ironically, even this symbol is the object of dispute and rivalry between the two men. Trigorin casts Nina in the role of the doomed bird, while Treplev claims it for himself. Unhappily, both turn out to be right.

Having directed my own (dreadful) version of The Seagull as a young man, I have only sympathy and admiration for anyone who mounts this beautiful, infuriatingly difficult play. I wasn't surprised to see it attempted by Raymond Munro, the nervy Clark University director who staged Ibsen's Rosmersholm last spring. Using Stephen Mulrine's translation, Munro has put up a visually meticulous and striking production. Derek Lane's set, accented by a shawl-draped garden swing in the first half and a fireplace in the second, romanticizes the flexible Little Center Theatre space. Medvedenko (John Macey) is pursuing Masha (Molly Hale) through the lobby as you enter, drawing you into the late-19th-century world of the play and underscoring the meta-theatrical aspect of the text, which begins with the botched premiere of the first play Treplev (Joshua P.J. Duksin) has written -- a symbolist work starring his beloved Nina (Siri Kaur Baruc).

This is one of several ways in which Munro experiments with The Seagull, though most of the time he hews to a realist style. With John Macey's help, he plays Medvedenko, the woebegone schoolteacher who wins Masha but can never capture her heart (she's hopelessly enamored of Treplev), entirely for laughs, and the humor is distinctly contemporary -- ironic, even campy. He anticipates Treplev's fourth-act suicide with an expressionist moment where the words of his play run through his head as he rips up the pages of the story he's been writing. These effects are fascinating, though, floating as they do in the middle of a realist work, they are also a little puzzling.

The actors give intense, committed performances, though Virginia Penta Munro, who plays the narcissistic actress Arkadina, needs more variety and less mannerism. I found Neil Schroeder's frail Sorin especially touching, and I was impressed by the growth in two young performers, Molly Hale and Alfred Aeed, who also played major roles in Rosmersholm a year ago. Aeed is a completely charming and believable Trigorin, and the part of the passive-seductive novelist is an extraordinarily tricky one for a student actor to conquer.

It's clear that Munro cares deeply about his actors, and that care compensates in large part for the deficiencies in rhythm and the occasional awkwardness of the play's staging. But a crisper production with fewer lingering pauses would serve them even better. It isn't a favor to an actor to direct him to cross out and tear up 10 or 12 pieces of paper, one at a time, in the already anguished final moments of a three-hour play. Chekhov gives directors and actors just enough rope. They fall in love with the luxurious monologues, the mournful mood, the tonal complexities, the innumerable shifts, and their impulse is to savor them. It's an impulse best checked.

The Theater Arts Program at Clark's production of The Seagull runs through April 18. Curtain is at 8 p.m., Thursday through Saturday. Tickets are $7; $3 for students.