Parents' Guide to The Seagull

Mayer's sensitive touch guides a superb cast to a fully realized take on Anton Chekhov's classic play. Subtext is everything in Chekhov, and every moment feels full here. Each character is alive in his or her skin -- feeling the weather, enduring the same old boring stories, flattering as necessary, painfully pining away. There are a handful of grand gestures, but the experience isn't about plot. The Seagull is called a "comedy" because it generates laughs of recognition, rather than moments of hilarity or "jokes." These are the kinds of laughs that sometimes hurt. We see our own thwarted desires in these 1890s Russians. Their foolishness, bad behavior, and sometimes unbearable suffering are all familiar to us. And Mayer and his actors fully embrace the desperate collisions under the story's often polite surfaces.

Stoll and Moss, particularly, achieve a lot with wordless looks -- though Masha, of course, gets some of the more familiar lines (e.g., "I'm in mourning for my life"). Stoll's portrayal of Trigorin could be said to have more depth than the actual character of Trigorin has himself. Chekhov's infamously feckless charmer seems entirely real here. His needs seem powerful enough in the moment to at least help us understand why he does what he does. Bening is appropriately exhausting as the narcissistic Irina, desperately grasping at her youth, white knuckled. Mayer reserves a moment of insight into her in the slightly revised conclusion. As her passionate son, Konstantin, Howle is likewise appropriately exhausting. He's a wrecking ball in these otherwise genteel environs. Jon Tenney disappears into Dorn, the doctor with an artistic soul. And Ronan manages to be sympathetic as another character ruled by her passions: Nina is a young girl desperate to rise above her difficult situation. As in the play, each character, even the minor ones, has a moment, a place in this ecosystem. Smaller supporting roles are handled by the likes of Dennehy and Mare Winningham; no lightweights here. Mayer brings them all together in a believable world. By making the experience immediate and the pain palpable, they've made a century-plus-old play relevant to new audiences.