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Chekhov’s 1896 play, “The Seagull” ...
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http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/theatre/2008/03/24/080324crth_theatre_als?currentPage=all
The Theatre
Servants of Art
A new production of “The Seagull.”
by Hilton Als March 24, 2008
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was one of Russia’s great chroniclers of social circumstances. Unlike Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, he saw his Russia—a place of bitter strivers, too trusting provincial women, and a mostly absent nobility—with a miniaturist’s humility: he would not make more of this society than it revealed of itself. Chekhov’s style is unobtrusive: the stories insinuate themselves in such a way that they don’t feel like fiction. If you read enough of his tales of new landowners, madmen, murderous aunts, dusty resorts, and innocent-looking dogs, after a while you may start to forget their plots. Chekhov seduces the reader gradually—his charm gleams like mica in his utterly plain, almost pedestrian language. Vladimir Nabokov, in an affecting analysis of the writer’s work—included in 1981’s “Lectures on Russian Literature”—observes that Chekhov wrote “sad books for humorous people.” He goes on, “Things for him were funny and sad at the same time, but you would not see their sadness if you did not see their fun, because both were linked up.”
Chekhov’s 1896 play, “The Seagull” (now at the Classic Stage Company), is clearly meant to turn on the funny-and-sad axis that Nabokov describes—Chekhov called it “a comedy”—but I have yet to see a production of the show that could be considered lighthearted. It’s a play riddled with absurdity, to be sure, but grief is its explicit subject. In the play’s opening moments, Masha (the beautiful Marjan Neshat) walks onstage with a lovelorn Medvedenko (Greg Keller) in tow; he asks her, “Why do you always wear black?,” and she replies, “Because I’m in mourning for my life.” Chekhov suggests that we spend far more time killing life than living it. And the various ways in which we murder our own happiness—through self-absorption, or by rejecting purehearted offers of love because we’re taken in by glamour—constitute the majority of the play’s action. Among other things, “The Seagull” is a spectacle of waste.
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