The Seagull Study Guide (12MB) - Goodman Theatre

The Seagull and Me
BY WILLA J. TAYLOR, DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
There have been many times in my life when I have been
madly in love with someone who loved someone else.
There have also been times when I have questioned
exactly where all the time has gone and wondered
– sometimes despairingly – if I have accomplished
anything with my life. Maybe that is why Chekhov’s
The Seagull is one of my favorite plays. Watching the
too familiar anguish and the longing play out on a
dacha in Russia is somehow comforting in its apparent
universality.
Like Mary Beth Fisher, the brilliant actress who plays
the narcissistic Arkadina in our production, I first got to
know the play on television. I had been assigned the
play to read one summer. There was a fabulous series
produced at the public television studios in New York
called Great Performances. Although now the series is
almost exclusively music, dance and opera, back then
it featured a lot of theatrical productions re-staged for
the screen. This particular one starred some of my
favorite actors – Frank Langella, Blythe Danner, Olympia
Dukakis, and Lee Grant. Unbeknownst to the mother,
the librarian, I found out it was going to be on television.
It was the same production that had run at the famous
Williamstown Theater Festival outside Boston. I figured
this would be just as good and a lot easier than trying to
understand an old Russian play when I could be hanging
with my friends.
When the performance started, I thought the impossible
had happened; a TV show more boring than the book!
But within a matter of minutes, it all changed. From the
moment Danner ran on as Nina, I was hooked. Here
were these young characters who were just like me
– Masha, rebellious and restless, deeply in love with
Konstantin; Nina, desperate to be a famous actress; and
Konstantin, passionately obsessed and desperate for his
mother’s approval.
Now, so many years later, I have seen – and worked
on - countless productions of the play. I have watched it
transported across cultures to become Regina Taylor’s
Drowning Crow; and transplanted from Russia to the
Hamptons, New York, in Emily Mann’s A Seagull in the
Hamptons. I have attended really awful productions at
colleges, and wonderfully realized ones at tiny theaters
in small cities. But each time I see it, whether the
production is brilliant or flawed, whether it’s in its original
form or a contemporary adaptation, I am reminded
of that first staging. I think about the comically tragic
costs of living; of how easily time and love can slip by us
without notice; and how exquisite it is to experience the
artistry of actors on a stage telling my story.
Interior of the Owen Theatre, a great example of its flexible stage during a production of House and Garden. Photo courtesy of Goodman Theatre.
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