Seagull
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At least at the beginning it’s possible to pretend. When Masha, the estate manager’s daughter, claims to be in mourning for her life in the first lines, we can still laugh it off. She’s so adolescent–so goth, in fact–in her black clothes and condescension. Likewise stagestruck Nina as she puppies after celebrities. And Konstantin, the avant-gardist with baby-pink cheeks, as he makes his grand pronouncements regarding love and art. Even when Konstantin attempts suicide there’s a childish extravagance to the act; nobody dies and nobody takes the gesture very seriously.
It isn’t until the play’s final act, which takes place two years later, that the seagull comes home to roost, as it were–and we become painfully conscious of where all this flailing and foolishness is headed. How it has to end up. Which is to say, bitterly.
Karen Janes Woditsch’s Masha exists in a constant state of turmoil that simply darkens as the play goes on, her comic petulance turning to deep alcoholic grievance. Janet Ulrich Brooks’s Paulina embodies a line from Whitman–“What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum”–while the object of her affections, James Leaming’s Dorn, wanders through the play looking like a man who isn’t sure he boarded the right train. As Nina, Karen Aldridge expresses a turmoil the other characters can only envy: modesty vies with palpable ecstasy in her encounters with Trigorin.
Price: $45-$50
