Has there been another theatrical journey, by any company in town, like Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble’s odyssey through the great works of Anton Chekhov?

For a decade now PETE has pushed, pulled, bent, twisted, and turned inside out The Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard — and now, this year, The Seagull, with its production of a seagull. 

a seagull, which will run June 29-July 13 in the Ellyn Bye Studio at Portland Center Stage, will be the initial offering of PCS’s new program “PCS Presents,” a “new community-based model of presenting performances in partnership with local artists and arts companies in the region.”

This journey began a decade or so ago with the inspiration of Czech-born theater artist and educator Štĕpán Šimek. Šimek, who teaches a variety of theater classes at Lewis & Clark College, had taught PETE founding ensemble members Jacob Coleman and Amber Whitehall at Evergreen College in Washington state, and had recently seen PETE’s acclaimed production of R3, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III.

This led to a golden-memory of a dinner party where Šimek proclaimed that he was going to translate Chekhov’s work and PETE was going to do it and it was going to be great and, in the words of another PETE founding member, Cristi Miles, “Who says no to that?” 

Šimek’s idea was that American theater had Chekhov all wrong — that what we were seeing and propagating wasn’t really Chekhov at all, but a washed-out, bland, romanticized version of a playwright who was much more visceral, energetic, urgent – and funny – than his stateside reputation.

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Šimek would say, relates Coleman, ‘I want to translate it where you get this sense of urgency like everybody’s dancing on the Titanic while it sinks.’” And in PETE, Šimek found a theater company he thought would be able to actualize his mission. He would give Chekhov’s plays the muscularity and immediacy they were actually written with, and PETE would provide the imagination and theatricality to bring the playwright into the 21st century.

The goal from the outset was not necessarily to do all of Chekhov’s four most famous plays. PETE and Šimek wrote a grant to do specifically Three Sisters and to host a symposium on Chekhov, both of which they accomplished. But the idea of doing all of the big four was always at the back of their collective mind, especially since they were armed with Šimek’s translations for all four.

But relatively early on, Miles says, “We realized these plays were big. ​​We weren’t going to have produced all of them by 2018 (when the symposium was due to honor the grant). So, we had this dream map, where we were going to produce one every other year, but the pandemic shifted things.”

“It has not been methodical,” says the fourth and final founding member, Rebecca Lingafelter. “It’s been more like, ‘Does this feel like this is the play that’s arising for this season?’”

A word that pops up a lot in talking art with PETE is “intervention,” by which they (seem to) mean that instant when the artist steps into a given project with the express intention to change things from the way they have been, whatever that means in the moment. So, in terms of this project, the first intervention was Šimek forcefully sanding off the romantic sheen that had hardened around Chekhov’s plays. Another intervention was, in the staging of Three Sisters (which Šimek also directed), placing the audience in the house with the characters. Or an intervention might look like what Miles did with Uncle Vanya.

“In Vanya,” says Coleman, “we make another change. We have live music the entire time. We put the actors in direct relationship with the audience in an outward-facing way – what does that do with this Štĕpán-translated text?”

For The Cherry Orchard PETE brought in New York-based director Alice Reagan, who “cut half the script and was like, ‘I’m going to set it on this arctic ice floe (laughs), so we really went away from the original writing,” remembers Lingafelter. And for a seagull they brought in company member and writer Chris Gonzalez “to write into Štĕpán’s translation,” says Lingafelter. 

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What does writing “into” Šimek’s translation mean?

“For instance,” explains Lingafelter, “[In the original] text of The Seagull, here’s a scene between Masha and Medvedenko where he’s like, ‘I love you. I know I’m just a poor schoolteacher, but I love you.’ And she’s like, ‘I can’t love you. I’m in black. I’m in mourning for my life. Take some snuff.’ That’s the scene. But [in a seagull] because we’ve cut characters, we don’t have a Medvedenko, Chris [Gonzalez] has turned that scene into a monologue for Cristi that has some of the same thematic threads, some of the same questions inside of it.”

“The reason to do these interventions,” says Whitehall, “is not just to do them differently, but to get closer to what Chekhov was doing, in chasing after something new himself.” For example, the form of Miles’ cabaret-style Uncle Vanya helped the production reveal more of the comic layerings that Chekhov always maintained were paramount in his work.

“We’ve talked a lot about this as a group,” says Lingafelter. “All these interventions, we’re asking how is this going to deepen our understanding of Chekhov. It’s not about  blasting Chekhov apart as much as it is digging into how it feels for us to do Chekhov now.”

“We can do both these things,” says Coleman, “illuminate why the hell we do a 19th century play in 2024 and make changes to what is expected from these plays.” 

The two- and three-sentence descriptions of the work don’t remotely capture the immersive, sensually dense, rich, evocative experience of Chekhov that PETE creates for the audience. If you haven’t seen them, click on the links: At each page is a video clip that will give you some indication of what you’ve missed.

If you have seen the shows, you are already aware of how comprehensively conceived each production is. That level of artistic synergy is achievable because the “ensemble” portion of PETE’s name is at least as important as the “experimental.” Their process, if it’s not unique, is definitely exceptional, and has been developed over the last decade of making work. “The trajectory of producing our work on Chekhov’s plays,” says Lingafelter, “has mirrored the company’s growth and how our process has changed over the years.” 

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For PETE the principle of ensemble extends from deciding what work to do all the way through to the actual making of the art in the room. So far, not necessarily so different from how other ensemble theater companies at least aim to work.

What sets PETE apart is that the process for an individual show is largely built around the needs of the designers, which for a seagull consists of company members Jenny Ampersand (costumes), Miranda k Hardy (lights), Peter Ksander (set), Trevor Sargent (video/systems), and Mark Valadez (sound).

A more or less typical regional or local theater process is going to have four to six weeks of rehearsal (or less), with the tech brought in one or two weekends before, slammed over a two-day process and then, if you’re a big house, you’ll get a handful of previews to tweak things. If you’re smaller than that you might get two – or none. Before this four-six week period the director and costume designers will have had a couple of production meetings to devise a plan to figure out what everything is going to look and sound like and how it’s going to happen – apart from the actors. 

PETE’s process, on the other hand, is a kind of dream scenario for theater practioners, the kind of situation you generally don’t see in this capitalism-laden culture, and which can’t (usually) be sustained through the regional nonprofit model. 

“Full transparency,” says Whitehall, “the way PETE can do it is by being subsidized by the institutions of higher education that our company members work at.”

Lingafelter runs the theater program at Lewis and Clark College, where she works with company members Miranda Hardy, Jenny Ampersand, adjunct instructor Cristi Miles, and – Štĕpán Šimek. Company member and scenic designer Peter Ksander is on staff at Reed College.

“We were at Lewis & Clark in the winter,” continues Whitehall, “we were at Reed in the spring, then Lewis & Clark in the fall and then Reed in the winter, and Peter (Ksander) works there so he can bring stuff and set it up in the room and iterate on the design ideas over the course of a few days because there are those resources available.

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“We’ve been talking recently about the time signature of the way the designers get to compose and iterate. It takes longer if, for instance, you’re going to bring in a whole new video idea; it takes the acquiring of the mechanisms and cables and putting it on the wheels and whatever it needs that takes longer than an actor having an idea and then going to it physically in the room.

“Because of the workshops it extends the duration of our iterative collaborative processes. The designers can take the time it takes to bring all those things into the room, and then that informs where the actor goes, what the movement becomes, and how the text comes out, and then Chris writes based on that, and somehow we come closer and closer to Chekhov.”  

“PETE is interested in horizontal art-making and emergent processes,” adds Lingafelter, who is the director of a seagull. “A director could not hold that room. There’s no way. It’s too much information. You’re doing tech and rehearsal and tablework all at the same time. The only thing that makes it possible is that all the people in the room feel empowered to talk to each other about the work that’s being made.

“So, Jacob has a conversation with Jenny that I, as a director, have no concept of, and they make a costume together, that emerges into the room, that speaks to this video design that Trevor has had a conversation with Cristi about. The culture of the room is a teeming thing as opposed to a ‘And now we do this, and now we do this.’ There’s a lot of flow-space in the process.

“One of the things when I was watching our workshop for a seagull in January is that it’s just so fun to watch, that flow-state of artists making something together in a really free space. In some ways, we’re putting that flow-state on stage. The Seagull itself is a love letter to the theater. It’s a love letter to the process of making art. It’s a love letter to this community of PETE, and a love letter to the community of Portland and these five years of facing this existential theater time together.”