Play, interrupted: Theater in the round

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
May 31, 2017

Continued from my previous post.

The fourth act of The Seagull takes place four years after the first three segmhs. The schoolteacher and the groundskeeper’s daughter have married, unhappily, and now have a young child. Both Kostya and Nina have had some success in the theater. But as the still passionate young man tells us, her personal life has been a disaster: She bore a child out of wedlock, and after the baby died in infancy, she seemed to lose a certain quality that had made her performances not only believable but in fact celebrated. As it happens, Nina has returned to the island, but she refuses to see anyone.

The scene unfolded on the sheltered porch of a pool house. I sat on the lawn taking in the play with the rest of the audience. The sun had sank beneath the horizon, and most of the natural light had faded. Every so often, I felt a gentle tap somewhere on my body. Rainclouds were moving in.

Play, interrupted: Theater in place

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
May 31, 2017

On the evening of Memorial Day, I drove to a residential street in a rural area near the county line separating Durham, home of the city of Durham, and Orange, home of the towns of Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Hillsborough. I went there to see a production of The Seagull in which a friend of mine was appearing. The show was being performed on the spacious grounds of a home; that is, it was entirely outdoors. It ended up being a memorable evening.

I’d previously neither seen nor read The Seagull, which Anton Chekhov wrote in 1895. This version was a 2012 adaptation by the British playwright Anya Reiss, which the local company modified slightly for the United States. Chekhov’s drama is set on a rural Russian estate, and the characters talk of running in Moscow’s exalted social theatrical and literary circles, while Reiss’s narrative takes place on the Isle of Man, with London standing in for the Russian capital. The staging I saw purported to be on a lavish, isolated Ocracoke Island estate on North Carolina’s Outer Banks; New York, naturally, was substituted for London/Moscow.

The estate is owned by Sorin, an elderly Supreme Court justice (at least in this telling), who lives with his young nephew, a passionate, impulsive would-be playwright named Konstantin, a.k.a. Kostya. All of the action revolves around two visits made to the estate by Arkadina, Sorin’s sister and Kostya’s mother, a famous stage actress. Her younger lover is Boris Trigorin, a critically and popularly acclaimed novelist, who indulges a mutual attraction he has with Kostya’s sweetheart, a local naif and wannabe actress named Nina. They’re not alone in having wandering eyes; aside from Sorin, his groundskeeper and a local schoolteacher, each of the other characters in the play is tied to one lover but makes a play for another.