The Seagull
THE SEAGULL, drama, rated PG-13, Center for Contemporary Arts, 2.5 chiles
In Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, just about everyone is in love with the wrong person. Aspiring writer Konstantin (Billy Howle) loves Nina (Saoirse Ronan), the pretty teenage neighbor who dreams of becoming a great actress like Konstantin’s diva mother, Irina (Annette Bening). Irina is in love with famous author Boris (Corey Stoll), a man somewhat younger than she but considerably older than Nina, who becomes madly infatuated with him. Boris takes a fancy to the young girl, and, as he jots down in a note for a short story, “having nothing better to do, destroys her” — like the seagull Konstantin has shot and given to Nina as a token of his frustrated love. And then, of course, there’s Masha (Elisabeth Moss), who is being pursued in vain by the village schoolteacher (Michael Zegen) while herself hopelessly in love with Konstantin. She always dresses in black, because, as she says in one of theater’s most memorable lines, “I’m in mourning for my life.” And there is Sorin (Brian Dennehy), Irina’s brother, who is too old now to be plagued by romance, but who never achieved either of his life’s primary goals: being a writer, and getting married.
The Seagull premiered in 1896, and revolutionized theater with its naturalism. A hundred and twenty years later, it creaks a bit in its attitudes and passions, but still cuts to the heart with its insights into the human condition. The trick is to cast it perfectly and present it in a fresh, relevant style. This production achieves the first goal magnificently. Bening and Moss are superb, as is most of the rest of the cast — only Howle doesn’t seem a good fit — and out of this glut of performance riches, it’s remarkable to see Ronan rise to the top in an incandescent evocation of adolescent dreams.
The goal of creating the right style for the production falls to a pair of award-winning theater talents, playwright Steven Karam (The Humans), who wrote the screenplay, and Broadway director Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening, Hedwig and the Angry Inch), and while they find some fine touches in bringing Chekhov’s masterpiece to the screen, they fumble others. There’s cinematic self-consciousness in the shifting time frame, which starts us out near the end, swings back to show how we got there, and then repeats the opening in revving up for the big finish. And the fussy editing, which looks as if it must have played so much better in the cutting room of Mayer’s mind, keeps getting in the way of the graceful flight of this Seagull. — Jonathan Richards