The premiere of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull in Moscow in 1896 is one of the great fiascos of theater history. The play was met with boos, the actress playing Nina lost her voice, and the reviews were scathing. The playwright was crushed. He spent the last two acts hiding backstage, and later wrote to his brother, “The play has fallen flat, and come down with a crash. There was an oppressive strained feeling of disgrace and bewilderment in the theatre. The actors played abominably stupidly. The moral of it is, one ought not to write plays.”
Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble’s a seagull, an exuberant riff on Chekhov’s first major play that runs through July 13 at Portland Center Stage’s Ellyn Bye Studio at the Armory, has no time for the author’s doom and gloom. The production attempts both to faithfully explore The Seagull’s questions about finding meaning in art and life and to blow them up. The company has heard Treplev’s call for new forms of theatrical expression and answered, “Hold my beer!” — a seagull embraces bewilderment and coming down with a crash.
Early on in the show, Ken Yoshikawa—as Treplev, and maybe also as himself—says he hopes his work baffles the audience: “I want them to walk out, eyes wide, saying ‘What the fuck just happened?’ Because that’s what happens after you die.” Later, Maureen Porter, as Arkadina and maybe also Maureen, counters, “You have to take care of your audience.” The tension between these statements animates the chaos and intimacy that follows.
a seagull caps a decade of Chekhov adaptations by the company, beginning with 2014’s The Three Sisters, followed by Uncle Vanya in 2018 and The Cherry Orchard in 2022. As with the previous productions, the show began with a fresh translation of the play by Portland director and teacher Štepán Šimek. Šimek is Czech and learned Russian as a child; he has quipped that he translated Chekhov from a language he doesn’t entirely remember to one he has never learned that well. His version of Chekhov is prickly and profane, and PETE company member Chris Gonzalez has taken this direction and run straight for the hills, simultaneously paring the story down to its barest outlines and embellishing liberally.
You don’t need a thorough familiarity with The Seagull to enjoy a seagull, but it helps to know the basic outline of the plot: A bunch of bourgeois Russians, many of them artists, are vacationing by a lake. They put on a play, argue about art, and fall in love with the wrong people. One of them kills a seagull as a misguided token of affection, which is received with the horror and disgust you might imagine; in shame, he tries to kill himself, and fails, and then tries again, and maybe succeeds. There’s a lot of infidelity, an infant mortality, a slow death by tuberculosis, and a lot of gloomy pronouncements of ennui and despair. Chekhov intended it as a comedy.
In Gonzalez’ hands, the play becomes a hybrid, alternating between fairly straightforward bits of Chekhov’s text and scenes in which the performers speak as performers—whether as themselves or as personas isn’t clear. In his hands, the story grows into a multifarious exploration of the work of theater: the writing and performing and scenery-moving and costume-changing and production-managing and choosing the color of the follow spot.
The wildly swinging tone of Gonzalez’ text is echoed in every aspect of the show’s design and direction. The design team (Jenny Ampersand, Miranda k Hardy, Peter Ksander, Trevor Sargent, Mark Valez, and Katie Shook all share credit in the program) veer between the stark simplicity of two actors under white light on a bare stage and an overwhelming smorgasbord of ideas and technologies. The overriding ethos of the design seems to be, “why not?” The abundance of ideas on display includes projected starscapes, live guitar music, origami, puppets, origami puppets, papercraft seagull costumes, handheld cameras, partner yoga, solo yoga, a poignant garment steamer, a therapeutic bicycle, mildly erotic carcass- cleaning, too many feathers, and one shocking and delightfully clever mechanical sound effect.
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Of all the many (many, many, many) ideas on display here, the tension that stands out most is between transparency and concealment. Much of the performance takes place before the bare concrete walls and acoustic panels of the Ellyn Bye Studio, and at times even these are rendered transparent through clever video projection, giving the audience a literal behind-the-scenes view. At other times, the view of the performers is obscured, leaving us on the outside, hearing but not seeing.
The technical abundance is balanced by the energetic and likable ensemble. Yoshikawa and Porter are joined by Jacob Coleman, Cristi Miles, Damaris Webb, Roo Welsh, and Amber Whitehall. Miles is particularly watchable as Masha-as-stagehand, lugging a gallon of vodka around on a giant carabiner and fussing moodily with her headlamp. Coleman plays up Trigorin’s deplorable smallness, smarming about in a sinister short-legged safari suit. The performers are clearly having a blast, and the fun is contagious.
In its play with a foundational text and embrace of theatrical abundance, a seagull often reminded me of The Method Gun by Austin, Texas’ Rude Mechs, which played in Portland at the 2011 TBA festival. But where that show, which culminated in a rendition of A Streetcar Named Desire without the characters Stanley, Stella, Blanche, or Mitch, was a bitter satire of self-serious performers, a seagull is a celebration. It answers, Why not write plays? Plays are fun!
In the end, Chekhov also came around. Four days after the premiere of The Seagull, he wrote to his friend Aleksey Suvorin, “When I got home I took a dose of castor oil, and had a cold bath, and now I am ready to write another play.”
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Also see Bobby Bermea’s column “PETE gets down to the Chekhov nitty-gritty,” which looks at how the show was put together.
