THE SEAGULL
Huge Theatre Company
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These aren’t extraordinary people in The Seagull, just a bunch of Russians, with about a dozen names apiece, killing time on a country estate. Essentially this is a story of unrequited love. Medvedenko (a schoolteacher) loves Masha (a malcontent country lass), who loves Treplev (a would-be writer), who loves Nina (a would-be actor), who loves Trigorin (an accomplished writer), who loves to fish but keeps company with Arkadina (an accomplished actor and Treplev’s mother). It’s questionable whether Arkadina loves Trigorin, although she certainly loves herself, and she props up everyone in the vicinity as a mirror to admire herself in. In the end, no one lives happily ever after. Life just goes on with its necessary compromises, except for Treplev, who shoots himself.
You can see how this play might easily veer into the ditch of either melodrama or farce. The Touchstone production swings toward melodrama by pumping up the relationship between Treplev and Nina to tragic proportions, although these two crazy kids aren’t really tragic characters.
Bad habits can be just as enduring, and Melinda Moonahan’s performance as Arkadina would have made Chekhov pull his hair out. Certainly Arkadina is supposed to be affected and vain, constantly striving to be the center of attention. But there still must be some character beneath the affectation, which Moonahan never considers. Her Arkadina is a caricature of a caricature, too remotely contrived to be intriguing or even laughable. In the scene when Treplev hits her up for some money, the stingy Arkadina explodes “I’m an actress, not a banker!” Moonahan delivers this line downstage center, facing the audience, going for the big laugh. She doesn’t get it, any more than Wrong-Way Riegels scored that big touchdown. Moonahan was facing the wrong audience. She should have been performing for Treplev.
All the more surprising that Paul Myers (as Treplev) and Stephanie Galfano (as Nina) should pull the play out of this tailspin in their final scene together. When Galfano cries, it’s not an artful sob, her face buried in her little fists. Instead Nina’s face turns ugly, twisted, infantile–in that pathetically absurd way that people’s faces really look when they cry. Then she pulls herself together, forces a laugh, or tries to anyway, and that’s somehow ugly too. My guard was up but I was touched–sympathetically, not sentimentally. Myers surprised me too, not by tearing those manuscripts up in a frenzy, but by calmly mutilating them and then proceeding stiffly and robotically to his offstage suicide.
