The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (review)

tired of the endless da capo arias, there was always something interesting but not too distracting to watch on stage. Serban in directing Alcina was not creating earthshaking theatre this time, but he did show that opera can be made watchable, indeed interesting and fun, when put in the hands of a capable and imaginative director. Alcina is indeed very long for any but the most diehard fans of Baroque music. Serban , in realizing the dramatic possibilities in the opera and giving them sharpness and focus, makes it truly enjoyable and accessible. THE SEAGULL Anton Chekhov Directed by Lucian Pintilie The Guthrie Theater (Minneapolis) Gautam Dasgupta Despite a well-established reputation in Europe over the past two decades and a half, Lucian Pintilie is a name relatively unknown to the American theatre community. He is regarded by many as one of today's leading theatre and opera directors. It was in the seventies that he gained notoriety for his unconventional staging of Turandot in Paris, with a cast consisting entirely of dwarfs. Since then, this Bucharest-based Rumanian director has continued to work in the West at a steady pace. Like most venturesome directors, Pintilie brings to the theatre a vision informed by a defiant and thoughtful reading of the dramatic text. In his production of The Seagull, the defiance is spelled out in the opening sequence. Through a transposition of scenes, the bleak opening exchange between Medvedenko and Masha is replaced by the card-playing episode from the play's final scene. Conventional directorial approaches usually take their cue from Masha's overdramatic reply-I am in mourning for my life"-to why she always wears black. Instead of reading Masha's line as the hyperbolic , impression-making statement that it really is, such directors succumb to the seemingly woeful tone of the line. This interpretation leads, more often than not, to a lumbering solemnity that disregards Chekhov's stipulation that The Seagull is a comedy. Pintilie's subversive tactic removes us at the very start from the possibility of misconstruing the Medvedenko-Masha dialogue as setting the overriding tone of the production. The radical displacement of scenes confronts us with a world at play, an inconsequential universe peopled by characters 83 C0 (D a). who while away their time at cards. This idea of play is at the core of this production. It subsumes Masha's response, seen not as mocking or tragic sentiment, but as a game played between her and Medvedenko. Through Pintilie's restructuring early on, the play's essential conceit-the notion of the game-is gradually revealed. Just as Masha continues to hurl insults at her schoolmaster, Medvedenko tirelessly and hopelessly seeks to endear Masha to himself. Even after they are married, nothing changes in their lives. The same can be said of just about every character. In the more than two years that this play spans, no one becomes the wiser for whatever he or she may have experienced. More precisely, Chekhov's characters reject the very idea of learning from their experiences. They see themselves cast in a mold of trenchant intractability, condemned to re-play their lives at each successive moment, as if it were nothing more than a game. One has only to look at the lives of the characters in the play to see how little the world around them affects their natures. Arkadina falls to sympathize with her son's unhappiness and makes no attempt to understand him. Trigorin, a second-rate novelist and Arkadina's lover, maintains his vanity through all the changes in his life. Nina, in love with celebrity, dreams of transcending her provincial life and her untutored acting abilities, only to return to the place of her birth In between stints at mediocre roles in just as mediocre theatres in the Russian countryside. And Trepleff, the romantically-obsessed playwright of new forms, ends up writing what we can presume is a sugary version of Trigorin's style which he belittles. Pintilie seizes on the fixed forms of the drama's characters in an ingenious 84 manner by placing them on the Guthrie's vast stage in an uncluttered and open set, brilliantly conceived...