GULLED

As the first curtain fell on Anton Chekhov's The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theater in 1895, the cast, gathering for the curtain call, was confronted by silence from the audience on the other side. For the cast, there existed such passionate devotion to the text that its failure would be felt as personal defeat. As the quiet continued, actors began weeping, when suddenly a roar was heard erupting in the house. The curtain rose, and the actors stepped toward a jubilant, grateful audience that had been moved powerfully by the playwright's words. That night, one play firmly established a writer, a director and a theater that to this day uses a seagull as its symbol.

At the curtain of The Seagull at Portland Center Stage last Saturday, there was polite applause from the audience, which dutifully began as the lights died. There was no feeling of dramatic change in the air, yet, sadly, something had been established--that the director, Chris Coleman, lacked sufficient appreciation for the human condition, its attendant emotions and inherent comedy.

Coleman seems to be a director for his age, perfectly mirroring the slick but soulless nature of American culture. We prefer surfaces to subtexts and cheap laughs to wit, and here Coleman has not disappointed. But it's a mystery that he set his sights on Chekhov, a playwright demanding delicacy and subtlety. Coleman, with his bread-and-circus approach, presents us not with a new (however bastardized) version of The Seagull but with an antithesis to it.

For reasons that remain solely his, Coleman has fashioned a dumbshow play-within-a-play prologue and coda wherein Konstantin (Michael Newcomer), the passionate symbolist writer, becomes the "creator" of The Seagull. Konstantin then haunts the wings of the stage throughout, taking notes on the action. At the end of the play, of course, the tragic young man shoots himself. But moments later, Coleman dusts him off and puts him back at his desk to wrap up the play. When finished, he puts a revolver in his mouth "for real." This is telling, for Konstatin, Coleman's proxy, isn't just ending his own life, but is banishing every soul in the play (his "creation") to a hopeless suicide's wasteland.

What are Chekhov's plays if not heartfelt declarations for life? Even in the throes of rejection, loneliness and heartache, his characters' indomitable spirits survive. It's the germ of Beckett's "I must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." "They have not given up," Peter Brook sings of Chekhov's people, but then he lacks Coleman's contempt.

Who are Chekhov's people here? Like the dramatis personae of The Devils, PCS's most recent Russian egg, they've become one-dimensional figures lacking psychologies, motivations or even sincerity that doesn't seem rented for the evening. Yet there is in this two-hour-plus melocomedy a few scraps of humanity that have escaped trivializing. One is the duologue between the novelist Trigorin and Nina the budding actress, which possesses honesty and vitality. But considering it within the context of the production, one must conclude that it's merely a positive, alchemic reaction between actors Scott Coopwood and Christine Calfas. Otherwise, this is commodity theater fakery with a sideline in crudeness. We've been sold a bill of goods marked "fresh, innovative and bold." If Coleman's work truly carried these traits, there would be cheering from another grateful house.

Portland Center Stage at the Newmark Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway, 274-6588. 7 pm Tuesdays- Wednesdays, noon and 8 pm Thursdays, 8 pm Fridays-Saturdays, 2 and 7 pm Sundays. Closes Feb. 3. $16-$44.

"Playwrights revere Chekhov perhaps because he found a means to tell the truth about people in

so balanced and sympathetic a way that one is moved to laughter and tears at the same time

's first production in St. Petersburg had been such a failure that Chekhov almost stopped writing plays.

WWeek 2015