Mary Beth Fisher, Francis Guinan lead cast of Goodman's Seagull

Francis Guinan and Mary Beth Fisher

The Goodman Theatre has announced its cast for Robert Falls's revival of The Seagull, Chekhov's tragicomic portrait of misplaced feeling, and it's packed with heavy hitters. Francis Guinan, hot on the heels of his first-ever Victory Gardens turn, makes his first-ever Goodman appearance as Sorin, the estate owner, with Mary Beth Fisher as his sister, the actress Arkadina. Cliff Chamberlain is Trigorin, Arkadina's lover, and Stephen Louis Grush her son Trepliov, the frustrated idealist playwright. (Trepliov might have been a model for Grush's frustrated-idealist-playwright character in Rebecca Gilman's A True History of the Johnstown Flood, as I averred in my review last spring.)

Kelly O'Sullivan is Masha, with Heather Wood (who played the sister of Grush and Chamberlain's characters in Johnstown Flood) as Nina. The cast is rounded out by Janet Ulrich Brooks (Polina), Dieterich Gray (Yakov), Scott Jaeck (Dorn), Steve Pickering (Shamrayev), Demetrios Troy (Medvendenko) and Rebecca Buller (Maid). The Seagull runs October 16–November 14 in the Goodman's Owen theater; tickets go on sale this Friday.