Monique Carboni
You take your seat, and the actors in front of you are doing warm-up exercises for their bodies and voices. It’s all very theater, dahhling. Hmm, you think, has the play begun? Is this a meta-thing because this is a drama about actors? Apparently, it’s really just a warm-up, and nothing to do with the play.
And so the tone is set; there is certainly a lot of fun to be had in Thomas Bradshaw’s play, The Seagull/Woodstock, NY (Signature, to April 9). A modern-day adaptation of Chekhov’s famous play, staged by the New Group and directed by Scott Elliott, it follows a group of theater types as they bitch, laugh, and fall in and out of love and lust in an upstate, arty idyll owned by retired lawyer Samuel (David Cale). Then at the end, three years on, as lives have been changed and tragedy—just wait for that gunshot—beckons. The audience sits around the three edges of the stage, which is a flat platform with scant decoration.
This adaptation is more comedy than tragedy. It revels in Broadway and theater in-jokes. It’s gleefully profane and irreverent. Smarts and general bitchiness are at a premium. Sure, sadness nibbles at the play’s edges, but the darker shores of Chekhov go unexplored; it feels more upscale sex farce. The love square is lusty, and the heartbreak that the cheating and lust necessarily produces—because people are careless, and theater people boning each other are the most careless of all—is sidelined. The play feels a lark, and strains for a deeper profundity.