[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts theatre review of Chekhov’s The Seagull adapted by Anya Reiss, directed by Josh Sobel, produced by FutureHome Productions at the Hollywood Fringe Festival 2023.
I love Chekov. Hilarious, poignant, ironic, deeply sarcastic and achingly sincere. His plays are timeless and effortlessly brilliant. Adaptations of such genius can therefore be a bit dodgy…so it’s a challenge to get it right. This adaptation by Anya Reiss, who wrote her first produced play at 17 and was part of the Royal Court Theatres Young Writers program, is a modern twist on the timeless family drama. Such a youthful mope fits perfectly with Chekhov’s melancholy soul and this ‘version’ of The Seagull loses none of the sarcasm and the vacuousness. In fact, it elevates it.
But this version has also the added bonus of an ambitious director and an incandescent cast. The Hollywood Fringe Festival might seem to have its own preconceptions about what could be performed, but this production’s rejection of norms is just as ‘punk’ as Chekhov and just as edgy as Reiss. Casting is everything in this play. For the audience to care, to connect, to believe these disparate spoiled wretches and to love them in spite of themselves, we must believe the actors and so they must be sublime. And they are. Utterly.
It’s a tiny place to fit such a big drama, with seats down each side, as if the actors walk a catwalk, barely inches away from the audience and with minimal set and the addition of portable lights being manipulated and moved around, forcing the audience into almost uncomfortable gaze. It’s an ingenious way of making us pay attention to every sullen glance or preppy strut. The entire slightly awkward effect of actors and words and astonishingly apt music is absolutely riveting. Like a performance of a performance, which must have varied slightly each night. Bravo for the actors for incorporating these tacit movements and maneuvers into their already wonderful interpretations of their place in this story. It was late, it was warm, I was aware of everyone around me, actor and audience and stage manager, and yet that felt entirely perfect. Especially for this strange and ethereal writer whose life was like the melodramas he wrote so beautifully.
This play was so intelligently and emotionally cast and none of it seemed contrived. The combination of trans, gay and mixed-race casting felt so perfectly natural and every actor was so incredible in their roles that I felt it necessary to ask thedirector, Josh Sobel, where these choices originated and how they occurred. So I reached out and asked him and he was lovely enough to illuminate his process…
Josh Sobel:
The process was in part a typical “let’s get a bunch of people I trust and adore together and do a Fringe show”, and then in part inspired by a process I learned about through and adapted from the director Will Davis, recently appointed AD of Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre in New York and one of the only openly trans artistic directors in the country. For The Seagull, each actor was told that while final casting would of course be gender- and race-conscious, they should ignore the historical and expected demographics typically associated with each role. Instead, they were asked more holistically “Which role(s) resonate most with you / who is really speaking to you directly and why”. And we cast from there, based on the personal associations and identities of the people in the room. And their identities are thus essential to their approach to each character, which in our view only deepens and personalizes the performance that much more through giving each actor increased agency both within the casting process and in the embodiment of the characters themselves. There’s a lot of rhetoric in our industry about inclusive and next-generation casting approaches – the recent Tony’s being very much part of that conversation at the moment – but it’s still something I encounter a lot of fear and resistance toward when it comes to building actual, structural processes and approaches. This production is very much an actualization, an embodiment of not only how such a process can work in real terms to create new opportunities, but why we believe that agency-rooted approaches to casting and acting, in fact, yields enriched storytelling and powerful performance on any level.
With the staging and design, I’m always curious about breaking proscenium expectations and finding ways to create intimacy through space, hence the alley approach. With the scenic and lighting design and lack of furniture, though, that is rooted in a core idea I associate with the play. And that is the idea of “falseness,” of artifice or fakeness. I see this notion as a foundation of the play. It exists not only in the play within the play and the story being built around people involved in the theatre, which as truthful or honest as we can make it will always be an act of pretending. But it likewise exists, in my view, in each character – Arkadina’s false clinging to the image of her past self, Konstantin’s need for his mother’s approval rather than simply making the work he wants to make, Nina’s soon-shattered fantasy of what being an actor is, the hopelessness of Masha’s pursuit of Konstantin, and of Medvedenko’s pursuit of Masha, Trigorin literally refers to himself as a fake… the list goes on. And so I wanted to bring this idea into the materiality of the play itself – hence paper bags and standing lights. I wanted a space that is literally built of paper and wires, of something fragile that could be pushed over and destroyed easily because it’s really built on nothing but these false needs, these longings and the blinder-wearing with which everyone seeks to fill those longings.
The Seagull completes its run this Saturday night at Thymle. Tickets are sold out, but you may be able to score on if you are willing to give up your first born… it’s a very popular show. With good reason!
One can only hope for an extension!!!
The Cast
THE SEAGULL features an ensemble cast: Avalon Greenberg Call as Konstantin, Donté Ashon Green as Arkadina, Adzua Amoa as Nina, Miguel Nuñez as Trigorin, Anu Bhatt as Masha, Alejandra Jaime as Medvedenko, Cal Walker as Sorin, BK Dawson as Dorn, Juan Ayala as Polina, and Hope Simpson as Shamrayev.
The Team
The production team for THE SEAGULL includes Ian Olsen (scenic design), Cad Apostol (lighting design), LEXI (costume consultant), Max Kunke (stage manager) and Yameng Deng (assistant director).
Where:
Asylum @ Thymele Arts (California Room), 5481 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90029