UMD Does a Play That is Not The Seagull
Lawrance Bernabo
November 5, 2022
No, I am not going to put Stupid F##king Bird in the headline and I will resist the temptation to work in double hashtags throughout this review. Instead, I will just say that the production that opened at UMD on Friday night is an extremely engaging rollercoaster theatrical experience.
In case it is not obvious from that title, playwright Aaron Posner has stripped Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull down to the skeleton, with a few bits of flesh left (I recognized at least one line from Chekhov early on). There are a lot of interesting ways to characterize the end result, but I will go with dramaturg Gavin Orson’s use of “metatheatricality.”
The point is not that you need to know Chekhov to get this play. All that is necessary is that you love theater.
Chekhov intended The Seagull to be a comedy, but Konstantin Stanislavski’s production convinced people it was a tragedy. Posner’s version makes it a true tragicomedy.
In other words, you are going to laugh from the gut, but you are going to take a few punches there as well.
This plot presents a chain of unrequited love. Dev loves Mash who loves Conrad who loves Nina who loves Trigorin who loves Emma. That adds up to four intersecting love triangles, and establishes Conrad, the suffering young artist, as the play’s pivotal character.
Director Lauren Roth takes great advantage of the intimacy provided by the Dudley Experimental Theater. Every character has a lengthy monologue addressed to the audience, done up close and personal.
As Conrad, Hunter Ramsden goes on some epic rants, bringing as much passion as he does pure speed to these explosions. Posner likes to take sharp left turns with his dialogue, and Ramsden not only handles those, he constantly shifts his delivery as well. These rants break the fourth wall, and one of them is done without a net because it involves audience interaction.
Conrad is trying to revolutionize theater, to achieve something that is “authentic” rather than “make-believe.”
His muse is Nina, played by Isabelle Hopewell, the actress for his “Here We Are” work in progress and the object of his thwarted desire. In a show that has so many impressive moments of performance, there is Nina’s final monologue, where Hopewell had me laughing at a stupid T-shirt joke and then had tears in my eyes less than 30 seconds later.
Irie Unity plays the little black cloud that is Mash and it is wonderfully ironic how she expresses her depression in singing songs about how “life is disappointing,” while playing the ukulele.
Cody Do gives Dev a certain naïve charm that helps explain why the character is able to stay out of the line of fire when any combination of the other six goes after each other.
Maddie Froehle’s Emma is an actress who does not have to see a show first to denounce it. Emma is also Conrad’s mother, although in name only. Even when Emma says the right words, Froehle strips them of the requisite emotion.
What I loved about Luke Pfluger’s performance as Trigorin is that I hated the character the moment he walked on stage with that smug little smile. Trigorin quickly proved he was arrogant, pompous, and everything Conrad was not (and not in a good way).
The character caught in the middle by his exclusion from the love chain is Dr. Sorn, played by Jack Senske. We wait the entire play for him to confront the others, and I liked how he did most of it with his back to the audience.
He also has the best use of a Life Savers candy since “Horsefeathers.”
Chekhov questioned what theater should be in his day. He wanted realism. Posner wants something more. A measure of his success as a playwright and of these seven performers is that at the end of all three acts (intermission comes after the second act), the audience did not know it was time to applaud.
Because they were not watching the play, they were experiencing theater.
That, more than the romantic entanglements, is what you are supposed to take away from t##s play.
Almost made it...
No comments:
Post a Comment