Eugene Weekly : Theater : 11.09.06

Shorebirds Take Heed

The ravages of love denied in The Seagull

BY SUZI STEFFEN

When you see a shotgun in a Chekhov play, you can be sure that the play won't end with that gun unfired. The Seagull, now playing at the Lord Leebrick Theatre, is a play about the consequences of love (and talent) denied — and it doesn't violate the creed.

Tregorin (Dan Pegoda) reacts to Arkadina (Kathy James Lamontagne)

Konstantin (Vince Camillo) is bored and angry at the stultifying conventions of literature, thought and action that bind his nearest and dearest. Add an overbearing actress for a mother (Kathy James Lamontagne, playing Arkadina), a lovestruck servant's daughter (Carson Shelton as Masha) and a svelte, stagestruck girlfriend (Amy Wray as Nina) along with assorted other characters, and Konstantin has more than he can handle. He's quite a frustrated young man, and his mummy is beyond self-centered. Then love patterns, more like a DNA helix than a triangle, bind everyone together in feats of casual emotional violence and blind agony.

Lord Leebrick Artistic Director Craig Willis begins with a nice piece of pantomime on the beautifully lit set, introducing us to the characters and their concerns as they stroll through a country estate, with chairs and a small stage amidst a smattering of half-abstract beech trees. The characters then return in small groups: Masha and her admirer, the dreamy and money-grubbing schoolteacher Medvedenko (Greg Heaton); elderly uncle Sorin (Richard Leinaweaver); Konstantin, his servant/stage manager, Yakov (Greg Gumbs, who brings a dead-on combination of look and attitude to this minor character), and Nina; the local doctor and womanizer, Yevgeny Sergevish Dorn (Bary Shaw) and one of his many paramours, Polina Andreyevna (Diane Johnson), who is married to the loutish estate manager (David Stuart Bull as Ilya Afanasyevich Shamraev).

There's a lot of laughter at the barbed wit and the exaggerated behavior of most of the characters. When Nina begins to speak the words of Konstantin's play from the makeshift stage, wrapped in white gauze, both the wild script and the almost melodramatic pauses amuse the two audiences. But serious consequences result from this evening, and before the play ends, we'll know more about lust and loss and how adults, using people in calculated ways, damage the soft and vulnerable young.

Director Willis notes that "Chekhov's dramaturgy is a masterwork of subtlety and nuance," which didn't quite get through to some of the actors. It's Chekhov's fault that Nina must declaim, "I'm the seagull" repeatedly in the final act, but Wray needs to make each repetition less like a skipping CD. And Chekhov wrote an Arkadina who doesn't have much to do but warp the minds of everyone around her, but again, Lamontagne and Willis need to extend Arkadina's range so that the audience feels sympathy for her. Her first scene is her strongest, a masterful piece of undercutting and upstaging Konstantin.

One pitch-perfect actor is Dan Pegoda. His naturalistic style of inhabiting Tregorin points up others' limits, especially when he and Wray have scenes together (Wray's scenes with Camillo are much easier to believe). Pegoda's monologue on the art and compulsion of writing means to, and does, give the audience deeper insight into Chekhov's experience of life, and his nervous tics seem almost charming even as he drops his helpless act to show the opportunistic, wiley man hidden inside. Richard Leinaweaver, Bary Shaw and David Stuart Bull each contribute solid acting to the performance. Greg Heaton does a fine job as the bumbling Medvedenko, and Diane Johnson's Polina seems realistically agonized by her brute of a husband and her cold-hearted lover.

Camillo, as the pivotal character Konstantin — tormented by his sensitivity, his mother, his mother's bourgeois and famous lover and a girlfriend who finds that famous lover more interesting than Konstantin — has a hard line to walk. He, like Pegoda and Lamontagne, must convey an awareness of his own character's place in the canon of Western literature; constant Shakespearean references keep the audience alert and, along with that shotgun, signify a march toward tragedy.

Words, words, words: Their power never falters, whether the power to persuade, to insult or to destroy. Lord Leebrick's production of The Seagull prompts us to consider the weight of words on the heavier, more final world of deeds.