Flying high again
A.R.T. makes ‘The Seagull’ soar
REVIEW. “The Seagull” has gotten a makeover courtesy of the American Repertory Theatre and the 100 year old bird has never looked better.
Under the astonishing direction of Janos Szasz, Anton Chekhov’s classic tale of the human condition feels like a contemporary story of desire, dysfunction and despair. And yet it’s set 200,000 years from now in an abandoned, dilapidated theater.
As the story opens, young playwright Konstantin sits alone onstage with the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. “Does he or doesn’t he?” never strays far from your mind as the details of how he got to this point begin to unfold.
Konstantin stages a symbolic play he has written for Nina, the object of his unrequited affection, while his family visits at his uncle’s lake house. The audience within the play doesn’t respond well to his avant-garde offering and his mother, a successful though aging actress, actually ridicules him for it. Meanwhile, her lover becomes infatuated with Nina as the family spirals downward into its own madness.
Though Szasz provides plenty of room for free interpretation and symbolic doublespeak, the characters are so contemporary that you’ve either experienced exactly what they’re trying to cope with or know someone who has. And his supremely talented actors make it easy for you to get inside their heads and almost literally feel their pain.
Mickey Solis is extraordinary as Konstantin, the misunderstood, anguished young man searching for love that even his own mother can’t give him. His agony is palpable as Solis holds nothing back in this brutally honest yet beautiful portrait of the depths of emptiness a human soul can know.
As his mother, the narcissistic diva, Karen MacDonald delivers one of the finest performances of her stellar career. When an actress of MacDonald’s caliber gets to play a spoiled, pampered star, the results, though not pretty, are pretty amazing. As she proclaims “But I am an actress” while perched atop a huge pile of luggage, it’s hard not to leap to your feet and shout “bravo!” for her.
Solis and MacDonald are hardly the sole standouts in this brilliant production, however. Nina Kassa is delightfully bored and depressed as the all black-wearing teen aching to feel anything. Jeremy Geidt nicely captures the ‘what’s the point?’ attitude of the family’s elder statesman Pyotr and Brian Dykstra is wonderfully creepy and lecherous as Trigorin.
It is a rare to treat to see every single piece of a theatrical puzzle fit so perfectly together. And it is rarer indeed when brilliant is truly the only way to describe a production.
‘The Seagull’
Through Feb. 1
American Repertory Theatre
64 Brattle St., Cambridge
MBTA: Red Line to Harvard
$25 - $79, 617-547-8300
www.amrep.org