Robust Actor’s Gang Makes ‘Seagull’ Soar

Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” must be funny if it’s going to be anything else. Yes, it is the saddest “let’s-put-on-a-play!” play ever written. (Moral: Do not mount an original futurist epic, set 200,000 years in the future, in order to win the approval of your hack-actress mother.) It is also a delicate and robust and ripely amusing experience.

Those adjectives apply to the Actors’ Gang production, staged by Georges Bigot.

Here, unlike some “Seagulls” you may have survived, everything in Chekhov’s lakeside community of Bohemian head cases has been made to matter. Director Bigot has pulled everyone in the Gang’s ensemble, even the miscast actors, into the same comically unstable universe.

It’s an interesting time to see Chekhov in America. Instability doesn’t seem especially comic right now. With anthrax scares, with our flags flapping somewhat maniacally in the freeway breeze, our country has determined that irony died on Sept. 11. Since then, we’ve been negotiating a popular culture suddenly into sincerity and ultimatums, the tone set by a president who talks like a Tom Clancy character stuck in a novel by Graham Greene. So how to deal with modern drama’s supreme ironist?

Answer: Do not be afraid of italics. Bigot, whose post-1984 Olympic Arts Festival workshops inspired the fledgling Actors’ Gang, believes in the power of the theatrical italic. When the dying Sorin (Steven M. Porter) suggests to his sister, the famous actress Arkadina (Cynthia Ettinger) that she give her flailing playwright son (Joseph Grimm) a little money, she reacts as if her hair were in flames. Cheating on her husband with the local doctor (Brian Powell), Polina (Clare Wren) confronts her lover about his other women--and, nearly out of her mind, does a literal cartwheel of jealousy.

This is not a revolutionary theatrical approach. Gestural expressiveness and physicalized intention can be used well or poorly, in many different ways. (You should’ve seen Lucian Pintilie’s “Seagull” at the Guthrie Theater--none better, none more mind-blowingly alive.) The performance style comes more naturally to some of Bigot’s cast than to others. The most blatantly miscast actor, Brent Hinkley’s Trigorin, works hard and honorably, but when he goes for funny, you notice the effort, not the funny.

Nonetheless, the atmospheric effect is total. At its best, this “Seagull”--the first production of Tim Robbins’ renewed Actors’ Gang artistic directorship--is the kind of Chekhov you don’t find very often: Funny, sad, sad-funny and then, thwap comes the arrow through the heart.

Robert Brustein’s translation is a solid and sternly witty one, its tone established when Treplev calls his mother “a psychological freak.” Grimm’s Treplev is a performance of stealth excellence, very sly and close to the vest, even when he’s flipping out with anxiety. Ettinger’s Arkadina is a swirl of ringlets and vanity, often riotous (though some of the shrieking is just shrieking, rather than shrieking in support of the character). On opening night, understudy Melanie Lora went on, script in hand, for an ailing Juliet Landau as Nina. In the final, painfully wised-up scenes, she acquitted herself especially well. Other standouts include Porter’s sweet, regretful Sorin, a first-rate creation; Wren’s quivering Polina; and, as the robust but fatally dull estate manager Shamrayev, V.J. Foster.

Bigot’s expansively playful approach has its drawbacks. This is a longish “Seagull,” over three hours’ worth. Some of the anachronisms--the 1920s and ‘30s pop tunes sung by Powell’s doctor in particular--belong to a lesser effort. It’s a tonic despite the problems. The mournful irony of Chekhov’s worldview feels more necessary than ever.

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“The Seagull,” the Actors’ Gang, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Oct. 27, 8 p.m.; Oct. 28, 2 and 8 p.m.; Nov. 7-9, 8 p.m.; Nov. 17, 8 p.m.; Nov. 18, 2 and 8 p.m.; Nov. 23, 8 p.m.; Nov. 24, 2 p.m.; Dec. 1, 8 p.m.; Dec. 2, 2 and 8 p.m.; Dec. 5-7, 8 p.m.; Dec. 15, 8 p.m.; Dec. 16, 2 and 8 p.m. Ends Dec. 16. $15-$20; Wednesdays, pay what you can. (323) 465-0566, Ext. 15. Running time: 3 hours, 15 minutes.

*

Keythe Farley: Medvedenko

Lolly Ward: Masha

Steven M. Porter: Sorin

Joseph Grimm: Treplev

Kirk Pynchon: Yakov

Juliet Landau: Nina

Clare Wren: Polina

Brian Powell: Dorn

Cynthia Ettinger: Arkadina

Brent Hinkley: Trigorin

V.J. Foster: Shamrayev

Adele Robbins: Cook

Jane Runnalls: Chambermaid

*

Written by Anton Chekhov. Translated by Robert Brustein. Directed by Georges Bigot. Scenic design by Richard Hoover. Lighting by David F. Hahn. Costumes by Ann Closs-Farley. Props by Chuck Olsen. Music by Hoagie K. Hill. Stage manager Jo Anna Underwood.