Thinking about Chekhov
Sometimes geography pays off. When I found out that the SMU theater department (“Division of Theatre”) was performing Chekhov’s The Seagull, the arduous five-minute walk seemed worth it. University theater is always an odd bird: spotty performances, unpredictable directing, a bizarre mix of audience, but the facilities are great. What a change to have comfortable seats (and a scene budget that these guys would kill for.)
No point in dwelling on the execution; the usual heavy-handed student issues, yelling-and-screaming at points, odd pantomime, pretty much in the top half of what you expect from this kind of thing. That said, Jessica DiSalvo’s Masha was a rare and pleasant treat of understated inebriation, and Lydia Mackay (good union member, her) might make me reconsider my position against breeding with redheads.
Right. It’s the content that’s important. There’s no doubt that much of what made this piece powerful in the original gets lost in translation. (Plot précis: party at country estate – kept writer seduces teenage “actress” – she goes off to big city and destroys herself – heartbroken young lover channels despair into reasonable success as writer – girl returns, bringing the whole thing up again – young writer kills himself.) Still, many of the themes still reverberate throughout the piece with a surprising power. (Corruption, as it were, being the grist of the title.)
What you have here is a roomful of characters intersecting at different points in their lives, and all wanting to trade in one way or another. There is the young girl entranced by how wonderful it must be to live creatively, and the older writer describing the obsession and self-loathing actually involved. There is the child trying to grapple with following the acclaimed parent – and how shallow the actual reality of fame really is. There is the poignant old man looking back on a life of missed desires, and finding solace in the hopes of loved ones around him. There is the middle-aged woman still in love with the man she wanted instead of the man she married, and then watching her daughter repeat the same. And then there are a couple of stock petty-bourgeois that can’t get beyond the rut of the immediate.
The whole thing makes you think about regret and disappointment and living up to a romanticized fiction. The grass, it seems, is greener for everyone. In the face of the complex world of the outside, the simple pure things we loved when we were young are still the most powerful ones. If only the simple beauty of the unsuspecting heart could adapt the world to its’ own image. (Proust and his four walls again.)
“We were happy, weren’t we Constantine?”
Yes, for a moment, we were.
No point in dwelling on the execution; the usual heavy-handed student issues, yelling-and-screaming at points, odd pantomime, pretty much in the top half of what you expect from this kind of thing. That said, Jessica DiSalvo’s Masha was a rare and pleasant treat of understated inebriation, and Lydia Mackay (good union member, her) might make me reconsider my position against breeding with redheads.
Right. It’s the content that’s important. There’s no doubt that much of what made this piece powerful in the original gets lost in translation. (Plot précis: party at country estate – kept writer seduces teenage “actress” – she goes off to big city and destroys herself – heartbroken young lover channels despair into reasonable success as writer – girl returns, bringing the whole thing up again – young writer kills himself.) Still, many of the themes still reverberate throughout the piece with a surprising power. (Corruption, as it were, being the grist of the title.)
What you have here is a roomful of characters intersecting at different points in their lives, and all wanting to trade in one way or another. There is the young girl entranced by how wonderful it must be to live creatively, and the older writer describing the obsession and self-loathing actually involved. There is the child trying to grapple with following the acclaimed parent – and how shallow the actual reality of fame really is. There is the poignant old man looking back on a life of missed desires, and finding solace in the hopes of loved ones around him. There is the middle-aged woman still in love with the man she wanted instead of the man she married, and then watching her daughter repeat the same. And then there are a couple of stock petty-bourgeois that can’t get beyond the rut of the immediate.
The whole thing makes you think about regret and disappointment and living up to a romanticized fiction. The grass, it seems, is greener for everyone. In the face of the complex world of the outside, the simple pure things we loved when we were young are still the most powerful ones. If only the simple beauty of the unsuspecting heart could adapt the world to its’ own image. (Proust and his four walls again.)
“We were happy, weren’t we Constantine?”
Yes, for a moment, we were.
posted by KP | 14.10.07
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