The Seagull

Workmen cart out a slab of rock on a dolly and deposit it onto a mostly bare stage: Falls’s production announces from its opening that it’ll take the Chekhov, Our Contemporary route, eschewing glitz for the spare contours often associated with Peter Brook. For the most part, it succeeds brilliantly, finding a 21st-century Seagull by diving deep into the text.

That text may well be the most self-consciously revolutionary of the Russian’s four masterpieces. “This seagull’s a symbol I suppose, but it makes no sense to me,” says young Nina (Heather Wood) of the dead bird presented to her by the feverish playwright Konstantin (Stephen Louis Grush). Her line could be an emblem for the whole play, a manifesto against manifestos that undermines all fixed viewpoints, layering on love triangles and pairing its frustrated expressionist writer with the equally frustrated, if financially successful, novelist Trigorin (Cliff Chamberlain).

A splendid cast keeps the eddies of Chekhov’s conversation swirling. Grush and Chamberlain render their dueling writers crisply; the center of this staging, though, is Mary Beth Fisher’s incandescent, monstrous Arkadina, the aging actress ready to slaughter the generation after her to ensure a continuing spotlight. Falls’s exploratory approach leads to some stunning moments, but a tighter directorial hand could avert some weak spots; there’s a bit too much drifting about when the full cast’s onstage, and Wood’s Nina stays too ethereal for her final scene to have its full weight. Still, this is the kind of production that aims to be talked about for years, and with a week or two more to jell, it just might get there.

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