The Seagull

When I was in college I was moping about something and I must have been asked about it by my favorite professor. I said something dumb like, "I just want to be happy." She replied, "Oh, you're just like a character from Chekhov." When I started college, I had no idea who Chekhov was, aside from a crew member on Star Trek. Now I consider him one of the great dramatists in any language, though he only wrote five plays.

Over the next few weeks, I'm Netflixing what's available of Chekhov on DVD. There have been no major English-language film adaptations that I know of (although I read today that they are planning on making a version of The Seagull with the recent West End and Broadway cast, that includes Kristin Scott Thomas, Peter Sarsgaard and Carey Mulligan). Fortunately there are stage and TV versions that have been committed to digital storage. That is when talking about his four major plays--Ivanov, which I've never got around to reading, and is rarely produced, is unavailable on DVD.

I start with The Seagull, his first play. Anton Chekhov, who was a physician, is greatly acclaimed as a writer of short stories, and tackled plays later in his life. His first was this play, written in 1896. The debut was a huge flop. It was only until three years later, when Stanislavsky directed it at the Moscow Art Theater, that it became a sensation. And now, over a hundred years later, it is in some ways Chekhov's most heartfelt play, a comedy with tragic consequences, and characters who are so overpowered by their emotions that they can barely function. It also has a commentary on the nature of modern drama and the prestige of writers. For over-sensitive artistic types, it's manna.

I've seen the play in performance twice, which I discussed previously. Last night, I viewed a DVD of a production made in conjunction with the Williamstown Summer Theater. It is not a video of a stage performance, but instead was shot outdoors, in natural surroundings. Made in 1975, it stars Frank Langella, Blythe Danner, and Lee Grant.

The play concerns a celebrated actress, Irina (Grant), and her troubled son, Konstantin (Langella). As the story begins, Konstantin is eager to show his play to his family and friends. The star of his play is a neighbor girl, Nina (Danner, who at that age looked strikingly like her daughter Gwyneth Paltrow), with whom he is in love. His play is very experimental and symbolic, and when his mother, who has made her fame in the more bourgeois world of the theater, scoffs at it, he stops the play in a rage.

Irina is in a relationship with Trigorin, a middlebrow novelist who is constantly carping about his reputation: "When I die, my friends as they pass my grave will say, 'Here lies Trigorin. He was a good writer, but not as good as Turgenev".

The play is packed with themes of the most basic human nature. There is aging and death, mostly expressed by the doctor (Chekhov, being a physician, uses doctor characters as observers in more than one play), of mothers and sons (the relationship between Irina and Konstantin will make you feel better about the relationship with your mother). It has parallels to Hamlet and Gertrude.

There is also the theme of misaligned love, which became a Chekhovian trait: Masha is in love with Konstantin, who is in love with Nina, who falls in love with Trigorin, who is loved by Irina. Pauline, the caretaker's wife, is in love with the doctor, who announces he's too old for such things (he's 55). Medvedenko loves Masha, who begins the play by telling him why she always dresses in black: "I'm in mourning for my life. I'm unhappy." Ah, this is what my professor was talking about! Chekhov's characters, especially in The Seagull, think of happiness as some sort of condition that exists independently outside of their lives. Today we might prescribe Masha some Xanax, or at least shake her by the shoulders and tell her to snap out of it. But Chekhov's characters are doomed by their heart's desire, and no amount of psychotherapy can help them.

The central metaphor, and the one that really makes this play get under my skin, is that of the title bird, who is shot by Konstantin in Act Two and given to Nina as some sort of offering. Trigorin, who sees this, makes notes for a short story: "A young girl, like you, has lived beside a lake from childhood. She loves the lake as a seagull does, and she's happy and free as a seagull. But a man chances to come along, sees her, and having nothing better to do, destroys her, just like this seagull here." Trigorin is talking to Nina, and by the last act we realize that what he has done is tell her exactly what he is going to do to her--he will, for no more reason than that he can--ruin her life. She facilitates this with her girlish crush--she gives him a locket quoting a line from one of his books: "If ever you need my life, come and take it." The casual cruelty of this is breathtaking.

Konstantin, the young tortured artist, will never get over Nina, and their scene at the end of the play, when she repeats, "I am a seagull" are heartbreaking. After she leaves, he rips up his writing and goes into the next room to shoot himself, which I'm sure spoke to the tortured artistic soul that I was when I was twenty but seems a problem ending to me today. Still, this play is so vibrant with the tangles of human emotion that to watch it at any age is to feel empathy for all who struggle to find happiness.