Williams’ Take on ‘Gull’: A Sea Change

“Every person writes as he likes and as he is able.” This is the first line spoken by the writer Trigorin in “The Sea Gull,” and it is in many ways characteristic of Anton Chekhov’s intricately human craft. Trigorin is commenting on a play staged by his young rival, Constantine, who is the jealous son of his companion, the famous actress Arkadina, and his eventual competitor for the affections of the lovely Ophelia-like Nina, herself an aspiring actress. Within this Oedipally charged rectangle, these pairs of writers and actresses enter into an often heartbreaking four-act dance. Their behavior is always multiply determined, and their personalities are always carefully layered with nuance, contradiction and a quintessentially Chekhovian capacity for surprise: “Every person writes as he likes and as he is able” is not an obviously rivalrous response of a senior writer to his junior but a piece of complex empathy and self-assessment whose significance deepens as the play advances.

One can’t help but speculate whether Chekhov would respond in a similar spirit to “The Notebook of Trigorin,” Tennessee Williams’ free adaptation of “The Sea Gull.” Williams began the play in 1980 as a commission for the Vancouver Playhouse, again demonstrating how unreceptive the American theater is to its playwrights in their maturity. He continued to revise the text until his death in 1983, but it didn’t receive its first complete production until 1996 at the Cincinnati Playhouse. “Trigorin” is not a translation but a kind of interpretive refraction of “The Sea Gull,” which Williams considered his favorite of all plays.

In his prefatory note, Williams asserts that “Chekhov was a quiet and delicate writer whose huge power was always held in restraint,” whereas “[o]ur theatre has to cry out to be heard at all.” This is a stock and old-fashioned reading of the Russian playwright. As Richard Gilman argues in a recent study of Chekhov’s plays, the portrait Chekhov seeks to draw is “not of an action but of a condition.” The true issue is less one of decibel than of goal: Chekhov is more concerned with putting ordinary life on the stage and picking apart his characters’ illusions, while Williams is in quest of the plot-advancing event and the bold theatrical gesture. Allean Hale is right to point out, in her excellent introduction, that “Trigorin” is “more Williams than Chekhov.”

Yet by striving to turn up Chekhov’s volume, Williams strips the characters down--not to their skin so much as to their one superficial, defining article of clothing, which he chooses from his own archive of costumes. In “The Sea Gull,” for example, Arkadina is vain, parsimonious and melodramatic; at times an unfeeling mother, at times a tender one. In “Trigorin,” she sheds her pathos and becomes a classic Williams “monster woman,” part Amanda Wingfield, part Williams’ own mother, who hovered behind the psychology of so many of his heroines.

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Likewise, Constantine comes across as bratty and petulant rather than, as in Chekhov, troubled, lovesick and Oedipally confused. But Williams is less committed to the dilemma of the young writer. As he aged, Hale tells us, the playwright aligned himself more closely with Trigorin. Who, then, is the man whose notebook--his essential writer’s tool--replaces the dead sea gull as the play’s principal motif?

While Chekhov’s Trigorin is, like Williams’, an obsessive writer, he is also capable of genuine feeling. For Williams’ Trigorin, Nina is more narrowly “the most important romance I’ve ever written”--written, not experienced: This is another of Williams’ flattening impulses, and it renders Trigorin decidedly unsympathetic. To explain Arkadina’s power over Trigorin, Williams makes him bisexual (Arkadina’s acceptance of his erotic adventures tethers him to her). This revision to Trigorin’s biography initially allows Williams to dilate interestingly upon the psyche of a writer who “needs a bit of both sexes in him,” but it eventually degenerates into clumsy confessions and melodramatic confrontations.

Freighted with clunky on-the-nose dialogue, “The Notebook of Trigorin” nevertheless remains a document worthy of review by anyone with an interest in the curious trajectory of Williams’ career. In the same way that Picasso copied Delacroix and Velazquez and remade them in his own image, so Williams appropriates and transforms Chekhov. The fact that he did so with bright primary colors rather than the shaded palette his antecedent favored says a good deal about how Williams had evolved, or perhaps decayed, late in life. “Every person writes as he likes and he is able,” indeed.