ARTicles vol. 7 i. 3: Konstantin’s Vision

RM: The first things many A.R.T. audiences remember about your work here (Mother Courage, Marat/Sade, Uncle Vanya, Desire Under the Elms) are the atmosphere and environment you create for your productions.  What kind of visual world have you and set designer Riccardo Hernandez made for The Seagull?

JS: From the beginning of our process, we were concentrating on Konstantin’s play-within-the-play.  I think Konstantin’s visionary drama is his poetic expression of how he looks at the world and how he sees the people around him.  I knew that I didn’t want a set with doors, walls, a house, and a garden.  So Riccardo and I began thinking about setting our entire production in the world of Konstantin’s play.  We’ve created a theatre that’s been dormant for thousands of years.  It’s full of debris, mud, and water – the way an abandoned, eroded theatre might look two hundred thousand years from now.  And above the stage hang reproductions of Andrei Rublev icons, because for Konstantin the theatre is a kind of church.  He believes in the theatre.  He has faith in it.

RM: So the set reflects the world as Konstantin perceives it?

JS: In the moment before he shoots himself, Konstantin looks back at what’s happened over the past two years of his life.  What we see here is the whole drama of Chekhov’s play from Konstantin’s point of view.  It’s the moment before he pulls the trigger.  A short moment, that’s extended theatrically and non-realistically over two hours.  So the production is a kind of flashback.  I want this to be the most emotional production I’ve ever staged.  I feel so passionate about the fate of Konstantin.

RM: Why?  What is it about his struggle that you find so engaging?

JS: What makes a young man so desperate that he’s driven to suicide?  Konstantin’s play is not a perfect play, but it is an honest play.  Everyone around him has developed routines in order to survive.  And those routines involve a lot of lies.  Lies in their relationships with each other.  Lies about their art.  Lies to themselves.  Arkadina, Masha, Dorn, Nina, Trigorin, Paulina – they’ve all managed to survive by lying.  Konstantin can’t lie.  He tries to lie for a short period in the last two years of his life, but he can’t go on like that.  So he chooses to live a life without lies.  But in their world, it’s impossible to survive without compromises and lies, so living without lies means dying.  I also want to bring out the generational conflict in this play.  Chekhov dramatized the huge gap that exists between our children and us. The Seagull makes older generations think about how they’ve brought up their children, and younger generations think about how they’ve been raised by their parents.

RM: In rehearsals you’ve talked a lot with the company about wanting to put everything on stage.  Why is this particularly important when working on a play by Chekhov?

JS: Because sometimes Chekhov is like the Greeks – so much happens offstage and between the acts.  We’re trying to make everything visible and immediate in this production.  We’re trying to put everything out on the table – the lies, the affairs, the betrayals, the shame, the compromises, the sex, and the passion.

Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg.