The Theater: Old Play in Manhattan, may 24, 1954

The Sea Gull (by Anton Chekhov) is a landmark in the modern theater: in this first of his major plays, Chekhov began to master his highly individual method and spoke in his endlessly imitated, ever inimitable tones. Even in the Phoenix Theater's disappointing revival, The Sea Gull could still be seen as a theatrical turning point— though, after 50-odd years, what it turned away from was as palpable as what it turned toward.

For The Sea Gull is not yet fully Chekhovian, not of the quality of Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard. Already—and quite wonderfully in places—it has Chekhov's fragrance, incisiveness, poignancy; It has dialogue that, if seemingly scrappy and elliptical, constitutes a marvelous sort of notation. Already, Chekhov can convey the apartness and aloneness of people; already, too, he can be about equally compassionate and merciless, not so much acquitting his characters as pardoning them.

But the play also dragged a good deal out of 19th-century fiction after it. Neurotic young Kostya Triplev wears the musty mantle of European Weltschmerz and Wertherism, and the sea gull, Nina, seems a period heroine who breaks romantically with conventional life, is "ruined" by an interesting older man and exhibits emotions not so much false as several sizes too large for her. Having imported romantic melancholy, Chekhov—being Chekhov—could only in some degree mock its posturings; The Sea Gull remains an uneasy mixture of satire and sentiment rather than a true fusion of the comic and tragic.

What is far more successful and Chekhovian is the expressive group picture—strewn with egotists, eccentrics and bores—which surrounds the youthful tragedy.

The play, with its writers and actors, has to do with temperament and ego and vanity, and again with irresponsibility and self-indulgence, disappointment and regret—with the minor-key emotions of which Chekhov was already a master. For Chekhov did find himself in The Sea Gull, while still owing much to others: he is actually inferior in it to the precise degree that he is indebted.

The Phoenix production was weakest toward the end, where the play itself is; and in the most crucial scenes, it pulled Chekhov down rather than kept him afloat. This was sometimes a matter of interpretation, but oftener one of acting. Maureen Stapleton's Masha came closest to an entirely right performance, while Montgomery Cliffs Kostya at the outset, and Judith Evelyn's Madame Arkadina pretty much throughout, also scored.