In the play Kostya criticizes theater presented “in a room with three walls and artificial light” featuring “banal scenes people eat, drink, love, walk about, and wear their jackets.” Ironically those banal scenes are not a great departure from the action in The Seagull, but Kostya’s ideal theater is outdoors and consists of “a curtain, two wings, and beyond that-open space. “Chekhov told Stanislavsky’s actors, ‘the stage is art, it demands a degree of artifice.’” Interestingly, while Chekhov’s collaboration with Stanislavski brought the playwright great success, Chekhov did “lament some of the things Stanislavski did, he made it all too naturalistic and realistic,” Feldman said. “There’s something about the texture of his plays and how the lives are lived and depicted that is truly unique in the theater, and we wanted to give that opportunity,” said Feldman, who is also the associate director of the Drama Division.įeldman’s vision for The Seagull draws on Kostya’s modernist sensibility and Chekhov’s symbolic naturalist aesthetic. (The last Juilliard mainstage presentation of The Seagull by fourth-year actors was directed by Eve Shapiro during the 1995-96 season.) For this year’s fourth-year students, however, The Seagull is their initial Chekhov experience at the School. The play has been revived regularly ever since on prominent world stages featuring a who’s who of famous actors.Īt Juilliard, second-year acting students typically study and perform Chekhov’s plays as rehearsal projects. In 1898, however, the groundbreaking theater artist Constantin Stanislavski and his Moscow Art Theater created a wildly successfully production of The Seagull that “marked a turning point in the art of the theater,” Feldman said, as it ushered in a new era in the study, rehearsal, performance, and presentation of drama. Petersburg: It was panned, and Chekhov (temporarily) renounced the theater altogether.

Life imitated art when The Seagull itself opened, in 1896 in St. The Seagull begins with a play-within-a-play-the premiere of Kostya’s new experimental work, which turns into a fiasco. As in Chekhov’s other major works, hopeless love triangles and eloquent existential musings abound until the play ends tragically. Along with a colorful cast of supporting characters, they praise, disparage, fall in love with, and forsake one another.

The Seagull depicts two sets of artists: the tortured young writer Kostya and his muse, the aspiring actress Nina and Kostya’s mother, Irina, a famous actress approaching the twilight of her career, and her lover, Trigorin, a successful writer.

Chekhov plays