Servants of Art.(Theater review)

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.

Chekhov introduces us to his characters in a pastoral setting--they have been called together to watch a play on a small stage that has been erected in a glade. The land belongs to Sorin (John Christopher Jones), an elderly lawyer who is entertaining his sister, Madame Arkadina (Dianne Wiest), for the summer, along with her lover, Trigorin (Alan Cumming), a famous man of letters. Arkadina's twenty-five-year-old son, Konstantin Treplyov (Ryan O'Nan), is the author of the play. It's a monologue about the lifeless future, starring his beloved, Nina (Kelli Garner), the daughter of a nearby landowner, and it's nothing like the work that his mother, a rich and successful actress, has made her name in. This he has made sure of. As Konstantin sets up chairs for the performance, he tells his uncle:

[My mother] loves The Theater, she thinks she's serving the cause of humanity, she thinks she's a high priestess of art, but what I think is, that kind of theater is tired, it's all worn out. It's so restrictive! The curtain goes up, the lights come on, you're in a room with three walls, and there they are, these servants of art, and all they do is show us how people eat, drink, make love, walk, and wear clothes. . . . It makes me sick!

Chekhov is expressing his own horror of the medium--and his ambivalent attraction to it, too. (Chekhov married an actress several years before he died.) Minutes after the audience assembles for Konstantin's play, it bombs: Arkadina more or less heckles Konstantin and Nina into bringing down the curtain. Arkadina is being unfair--the piece is a little too heavily symbolic ("And the weary moon in heaven lights her lamp in vain"), but it has an otherworldly appeal, which Dr. Dorn (David Rasche) acknowledges at the end of Chekhov's first act, when he tells Konstantin, "You tackled a difficult subject, an abstract one. And you were right to. Every work of art has to express some great idea. True beauty is always a serious matter." But Konstantin's raging against the strictures of traditional theatre reveals something essential about his character: rooted in his speech is the soul of a critic. (Perhaps having had Arkadina as a mother has made him one.) ...