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Robert Brustein
on Theater
Issue Date: 09-17-2001 In The Seagull, Chekhov tells us that Maupassant ran away from the Eiffel Tower to escape its crushing, overwhelming vulgarity. That is how I usually feel about celebrity classics. Heaven knows, these star-studded dress parades have not proved very satisfying in the past. The only memorable thing about a forgettable Twelfth Night in Central Park in 1989, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Gregory Hines, and Jeff Goldblum, was how it widened the great divide between movie acting and stage acting. A similar problem afflicted Mike Nichols's Waiting for Godot at Lincoln Center in 1988, in which Robin Williams as Gogo spent a lot of stage time squeezing his eyes into his patented smile, horsing around with his part, even leaping into the audience to sign autographs. Celebrity Chekhov is somewhat more problematic. Those with long memories may recall a lackluster production of Three Sisters in 1943 starring Katherine Cornell, Ruth Gordon, and Judith Anderson, or an even more catastrophic Actors Studio production of the play some twenty years later starring Kim Stanley, Geraldine Page, Kevin McCarthy, and Shelley Winters. None of these stars was basically unequipped to play Chekhov' s characters. All of them, in fact, were considerably accomplished performers. They were simply incapable of sufficiently submerging their idiosyncratic, charismatic personal styles into the synergy of an ensemble. Without this capacity, Chekhov founders like a leaky bucket, which is why The Seagull was such a flop when it was first performed in Moscow by pickup actors, and such a rousing success when it was revived a few years later by Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater company. Good ensemble playing is especially important in The Seagull because the play is so preoccupied with the purpose of theater and the nature of acting. It is no accident that the very first thing the audience sees upon taking its seats at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park is a stage being erected in front of a lake, designed to accommodate Treplev's obscure little monologue about the "World Soul." Stage and lake, representing artifice and nature, are, in fact, the key images of The Seagull, which measures the varying degrees to which artists are capable of evoking reality. Not only does the play feature two actors (Arkadina and Nina) and two writers (Trigorin and Treplev), but virtually everybody else in it either wants to be an artist or has opinions about art. The sympathetic Dr. Dorn is the only one to admire Treplev's play, but nevertheless advises him to provide his work with purpose. Even Arkadina's boorish steward, Shamrayev, when he is not refusing to furnish her with horses, is busy boring everybody to death with his rambles about the old idols of the popular stage. By contrasting the creative attitudes of his actors and writers, Chekhov is suggesting something about art and nature, and especially about the nature of art. Arkadina is a grande dame of the reigning commercial theater; Trigorin is a driven but second-rate short-story writer and quondam dramatist; Treplev is a would-be avant-gardist trying to satisfy his passion for new forms by writing in the dreamy, abstract style of Maeterlinck and Strindberg. It is typical of Chekhov's modesty that nobody in the play represents the kind of subtle impressionist art that the playwright himself practiced. Trigorin does, a little, when writing about landscapes; but it is probably Nina who, after much personal adversity and artistic suffering--and after overcoming her weakness for fame and celebrity--may be evolving into the kind of truthful artist that Chekhov himself aspired to be. At the end of the play, in a rare moment of self-revelation, Chekhov expresses his artistic credo through the mouth of Treplev, namely that good writing is characterized less by formal innovation than by emotional sincerity and spiritual truth: "The more I think of it the more I' m convinced it's nothing to do with old or new--one has to write without thinking of forms at all--just let it flow naturally from the soul." Unable to act on his own discovery, Treplev puts a bullet through his head. This is an admittedly long-winded way of saying why I felt so apprehensive about the star-studded cast that Mike Nichols assembled for The Seagull at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Indeed, I came to the show with my review mentally half-written, full of admonitions about the cultural chasm dividing the two coasts, about how you do not form an ensemble by throwing a bunch of people together for the first time, about how movie stars cannot abandon the stage for years and expect still to feel comfortable on it. Yet I was agreeably surprised to see a generally unified acting company performing a great play with remarkable precision under a masterly director. On the strength of this production alone, and on the arguable assumption that they would choose to continue working together, these actors have the potential to become one of the finest companies in the world. There are, of course, things to quarrel with in this production. It is not the definitive Seagull. But then no production of a great play is definitive--not even Stanislavsky's celebrated version, which, according to Chekhov, turned his characters into crybabies. But Nichols' s production is a thoroughly engrossing, carefully detailed approach to the play, with some performances that touch sublimity. I still believe that pickup casts, no matter how glamorous, are invariably inferior to permanent ensembles, no matter how workaday. But these actors are not exactly strangers to one another. Many of them have not only performed under Nichols before, they have also acted together on both stage and screen. Meryl Streep (Arkadina) and Kevin Kline (Trigorin) starred in Sophie's Choice; Christopher Walken (Sorin) appeared with Streep in The Deer Hunter; Stephen Spinella (Medvedenko) was on stage with Marcia Gay Harden (Masha) in Angels in America, and later appeared with Walken in The Dead, and so forth. This is no itinerant gathering of stars, but a dedicated band of serious artists, many of whom share a similar aesthetic and training. The two major exceptions to this rule are Philip Seymour Hoffman (Treplev) and Natalie Portman (Nina), who, though perhaps not for that reason, are the weakest elements in the evening. Chekhov would probably feel that Hoffman, a splendid if overly chunky actor seriously miscast as Treplev, was one of Stanislavsky's crybabies. Hoffman certainly seems to be playing his final action the moment he appears on stage- -weeping, whining, shouting, and neurotically flailing about as if he were planning his suicide for the first act instead of the fourth. Nor is he helped much by Portman's vaguely callow Nina, who faints almost as often as Treplev weeps. I found myself further distracted by her debutante slouch, her habit of breaking into sudden, involuntary giggles, and her curiously gauche costuming. Indeed, most of the women' s costumes (Arkadina's excepted) are surprisingly uninspired, despite having been designed by the incomparable Bob Crowley. On the other hand, Crowley's bucolic forest of young birches, exquisitely lighted by Jennifer Tipton, turns Central Park into a magical Russian estate ("directly in the flight path of the Smolensk airport," a voice warns us before the show begins, to account for the noise of the planes overhead). Most of the other actors are superb, including those in such relatively minor roles as Shamrayev (John Goodman's sunny nature disguising the face of a brutish and vulgar lout) and Masha (Marcia Gay Harden's dark good looks gradually deteriorating, through her compulsiveness and addictiveness, into coarseness and vulgarity). Christopher Walken has once again not fared well with the critics; but it is time people recognized that he is one of the great American actors. I found his Sorin to be one of the most deliberate and surprising moment-to-moment performances I have ever seen. At first glance he would seem to have been better cast in the part of Trigorin (Walken probably thought so, too). But Nichols's instinct was correct. Instead of the decrepit, disappointed invalid of tradition, Walken creates a seedy remnant of a once elegant man, with a sublime sense of humor that infects the audience with every line. His fainting scene, in which he starts a merry dance, then seems to feign tripping, falls to the ground, and lies perfectly still in the first stages of a stroke, is alone worth the price of admission (even if admission to the park is free). The Dr. Dorn of Larry Pine (he played Astrov in Vanya on 42nd Street) is the soul of sympathy, performed with deceptive effortlessness and a whiskey baritone reminiscent of Jason Robards. Kevin Kline's Trigorin has been criticized for being too passive and melancholy, but those are the requirements of the character, and Kline fulfills them with modesty and grace. Costumed in a Byronic style--white suit and open shirt--that enhances his sexual attractiveness, he perfectly captures the way an uncertain ego can be flattered into an infatuation (he lays claim to Nina by placing his hat on her head). When he tries to leave Arkadina, he does an arc from determination to apathy, after having been literally pinned to the floor. In the act of making love to her, he pauses to make a note for a short story. (Arkadina, lying on top of him, speaks her famous aside, "Now he is mine," directly into his ear.) Which brings us to Meryl Streep, who is back on stage in fine comic fettle as if that long hiatus of twenty years had never occurred. Comedy is a style she uses too rarely nowadays. Not since her Dunyasha in Serban's Cherry Orchard has she had such a giddy romp. Streep seems to have overcome her worst acting problem, the habit of not looking at the people to whom she is speaking; and her meticulous preparation for her role has not affected her capacity to create an illusion of spontaneity. (Streep's acting is so real that one is not sure whether the character has misquoted Hamlet or the actress has forgotten her lines.) Playing a vigorous, muscular character who is the polar opposite of those lachrymose movie victims she has been saddled with in Hollywood, she shows us a woman at once vain and compassionate, miserly and generous, humorous and humorless. After she and Treplev have their Gertrude-Hamlet exchange, she encourages applause with subtle motions of her hands. She interpolates songs to relieve her insupportable boredom and warbles Russian lullabies while bandaging her son's head. Demonstrating her physical and temperamental superiority to the younger Masha, she performs a cartwheel, then pauses to rub an arthritic joint. When Shamrayev refuses to give her horses--"Which horses?" he asks. "Their names?" she responds in outrage--Streep falls on the floor in a theatrical swoon, screaming, "I am insulted by everyone!" The last moment of the play, when she catches a hint of Treplev's death on Trigorin's face as the lights are going down, is, though wordless, one of the most expressive moments of the production. I have not said a lot about Mike Nichols's direction because, as he demonstrated in his excellent Uncle Vanya some years ago, he never lets you know where the acting ends and the directing begins. But there is no question who has been largely responsible for the high quality of the performances and the evenness of the ensemble. The only intrusive directorial gesture, a moment that has attracted great praise though it belongs in the movies, is when Treplev's shot to his head is signaled by a smear of blood on the back of his chair. As you might expect, Nichols has stressed the comic aspects of The Seagull, even squeezing laughs out of Treplev's little playlet, but Chekhov did insist all along that he had written a comedy. A word about Tom Stoppard's adaptation. It is funny, vivid, clear, speakable, usually eloquent--and finally unsatisfying. It is not just that some of the exchanges between Arkadina and Treplev in their quarrel scene were interpolated from Waiting for Godot. (Treplev taunts his mother by calling her "Comedienne," and she annihilates him with Beckett's most insulting expletive, "Critic!") But when Nina is meant to say that the most important quality for an actress is not the dream of fame but rather "endurance" or "resignation" or "persistence," as it is variously translated, Stoppard substitutes the word "stamina, " as if to suggest that great acting is indistinguishable from long- distance running. I tend to admire Stoppard's adaptations more than his plays. He is a gifted impersonator with a great talent for capturing the style of other writers. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the adaptation Nichols commissioned from Richard Nelson, which Streep rejected, might have been the stronger version. And a final word about reviewers. I speculated earlier that the artists associated with The Seagull were capable of evolving into one of the great theater companies of the world, if only they could make the commitment. The main obstacle to such a development has always been the incapacity of agent-driven stars to absorb the message of the play: namely, that great acting is defined by seeking truth in art, not by the pursuit of Oscars or the acquisition of real estate in Bel Air. It now seems likely that an equally great deterrent is the insensitivity of theater critics, whose thoughtless notices can drive good actors back to what is safe and secure, and discourage them from risking their careers on the stage. Robert Brustein on Theater, The New Republic, 09-17-2001.
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