Introduction to A Seagull in the Hamptons
In October of 1895, Anton Chekhov wrote to his friend and publisher Alexei Suvorin to let him know that he was again working on a play. “I am writing it with considerable pleasure, though I sin frightfully against the conventions of the stage. It is a comedy with three female roles, six male roles, four acts, a landscape (a view of a lake), much conversation about literature, little action and five tons of love.”
Chekhov did not yet know all the details of the play he was writing, but the outline is there for what would become the first of his four major plays: The Seagull. Sins against convention. Characters. A landscape. Five tons of love.
By disregarding the stage conventions of his time, Chekhov was writing what even today feels like a remarkably modern play. The first production was a notable failure for reasons unconnected to the script itself (it was under-rehearsed, and the audience, most of whom had come to support an actress best known for her success in light French farces, did not know what to make of the play). Yet the actress M.M. Chitau recalled that “backstage…it was already being said that The Seagull was written in completely, totally new tones.”
“Chekhov’s tone in The Seagull is bantering, excited, matter-of-fact, or affectionate, but never somber and never cold. He’d enjoyed writing the play, he let it be known, something rather rare for him, and the pleasure permeates the text,” observes critic Richard Gilman in his book Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening Into Eternity. The noted translator Paul Schmidt writes that Chekhov’s language is “ordinary language.” Because of Chekhov’s innovative style the play easily translates to modern times and a contemporary vernacular.
Chekhov was inspired by the lives of people he knew—largely fellow artists—and for a modern artist, the same is true. Adapter/director Emily Mann reflects that “every single one of these characters is someone I know. The older actress, her troubled son, the young writer who is really, really full of himself and isn’t quite as good as he wants to be and can’t quite commit to a woman—I know them all too well. The young girl who wants to be an actress and falls madly, insanely in love with the older man who uses her and throws her away—these beautiful, simple, completely true and real characters—they were true then; they’re true now. Wherever or whenever you set this play, you will find the truth in it, because that was Chekhov’s genius.”
Chekhov also took the time to consider the landscape, a sometimes underappreciated element. He believed in the value of a country retreat; “Congratulations on your new purchase,” he wrote to his friend Nickolai Leikin in 1885. “I am awfully fond of everything that goes by the name ‘estate’ in Russia. That word has not yet lost its poetic overtones. You should enjoy a rest then this summer.” In Mann’s play, the lake becomes an ocean, but the estate is still an estate—on the shores of Long Island in the constantly shifting social scene that is the Hamptons.
Indeed, the Hamptons is a natural fit for The Seagull—there is the water, of course, and the estates, the interplay of those who live and work there and those who visit on vacation. And there are, and always have been, the artists; Pollock, de Kooning, Vonnegut, Lichtenstein, Albee and Capote all spent (or spend) significant time there. “I set it in the Hamptons because it’s where theater folk go, where intellectuals go, in our area, anyway…The Hamptons is a certain class of New York theater people and New York writers, and people with money and all of that, and I’ve gone there, so I know it,” explains Mann.
The Hamptons also struggles (and has long struggled) with shifting identities. The generational divide is apparent there, as the steady increases in real estate values and development of the twentieth century have accelerated into the dramatic spikes of the twenty-first. As recently as the 1980s, a moderately successful theater artist might have been able to buy a small escape in some towns; now long-time visitors find themselves surrounded by the super-rich (as opposed to the comfortable, or merely rich). More and more people arrive, but many of the artistic and intellectual New Yorkers who might have gone to the Hamptons in the 1960s or 70s (or even 80s or 90s) now find it inaccessible.
In 1973, Truman Capote mourned that “some of the potato fields, so beautiful, flat and still, may not be here next year. And fewer the year after that. New houses are steadily popping up to mar the long line where the land ends and the sky begins.” The worry was the same, but the urgency a bit stronger, in 2002, when Edward Albee wrote in the forward to Hamptons Bohemia, “To walk along the beach in the Hamptons or Montauk (preferably off-season) with the wind and the sand blowing, the gulls wheeling, and the surf crashing is cleansing and revivifying. I don’t think that whatever creativity I possess would come into proper focus without it, and if I become churlish over the suburbanizing of the area, its preposterous excesses, its denaturalizing, it is simply because fewer and fewer of the young, still poor, not yet famous creative artists on whom our culture depends are able to know its wonders….”
Still, while its presence may be fading, this artistic history resonates in the Hamptons. It is a location that reminds visitors of its history, a bit like a contemporary adaptation recalling its original. Richard Gilman, in his essay on The Seagull, notes that “theater…is the most cannibalistic of the arts, forever chewing on its own history.” We regularly set out to re-explore classics. A Seagull in the Hamptons is such an exploration: at once a new, contemporary play and a timeless classic, true to Chekhov’s vision of “a comedy with…four acts, a landscape…and five tons of love.”
“I gave myself total freedom to just write and respond,” Mann explains as she describes her adaptation process, “and what came out was actually very faithful to Chekhov and yet also very contemporary.” While the background is interesting, and the history rich for both the setting and the original source, A Seagull in the Hamptons also stands alone, ready for its own responses. Says Mann: “I want the audience to come to it absolutely fresh and with no preconceptions, and just see how it hits them.”
-Carrie Hughes, production dramaturg
