Fun with Chekhov by the sea
Robert Hall
Monday, March 29, 2010
The Piedmont Post

Ah life! What a drag! At least that’s the view troubling the waters of of Emily Mann’s A Seagull in the Hamptons, now in a briskly watchable Shotgun Players production in Berkeley. It surfaces in lines like, “I’m in mourning for my life,” and, “I really can’t stand things any more.”

And it’s a comedy.

That’s what Chekhov called it anyway. He never wrote a play named A Seagull in the Hamptons, you say? True, but Mann’s work is an adaptation of one he did write, his early The Seagull. There’s still a gunshot at the end, but the action takes place on a beach on Long Island rather than at an isolated Russian estate, and Moscow has been replaced by New York City. As for the dramatis personae, they’ve gone contempo, as has the milieu, with references to global warming, terrorists and Meryl Streep. But the sadness remains, the sense of life wasted, of emotions unrequited, and the gently mocking comedy is all there, too, in lines like, “Rich or poor, it’s good to have money,” and “Old people should never have been born.” That one cracked me up.

The central character, or at least the focus of the turbulent ensemble, around whom everyone’s life revolves, is the famous actress, Maria, who breezes into her brother Nicholas’s beachfront house with her young lover, well-known writer, Philip. Servants Lorenzo and Paula and their daughter, Nina, an aspiring actress, await them, as does the local doctor, Ben, long smitten with Maria, and Maria’s son, Alex, who longs to be a writer. Glum, alcoholic Milly and her would-be lover, the stodgy Harold, hang around the tale like albatrosses around a doomed ship.
Everyone in the play loves someone who doesn’t love him/her, and a large measure of our enjoyment comes from tangled relationships that are as contrived as anything in a Shakespeare comedy. Chekhov is a realist, however, and what he means to chronicle , and to pay homage to, are the longings of ordinary people. He asks us both to laugh at those people and to cry for them — he’s the most sanely compassionate of playwrights.

Under Reid Davis’s canny direction, Shotgun gives Mann’s smart adaptation a graceful and genial production. Robert Broadfoot supplies a wonderful big sandbox of a set — yes, real sand! — enhanced by a panel of weathered shingles, a curtain and some pilings. Matthew Royce lights scenes beautifully, Eric Pearson adds fine sound, from Sinatra to seagulls, and Victoria Livingston-Hall dresses the cast in wonderful costumes.

The star of the show is Trish Mulholland, as Maria. Flaunting a throaty Tallulah Bankhead voice, somewhere between a foghorn and a cello, she seems to be channeling middle-aged Elizabeth Taylor at her entertainingly messiest; she’s hilariously self-centered. Jon Voight-ish Alex Moggridge makes a quietly magnetic Philip, and Anna Ishida earned well-deserved applause opening night for an inebriated turn. All the actors — Andy Alabran, Lisa Deitchman, Richard Louis James, Mark Manske, Kelsey Venter and Piedmont’s own John Mercer — fill their roles satisfyingly.

An absorbing pleasure, A Seagull in the Hamptons plays at the Ashby Stage until April 25th, followed by Jenny Schwartz’s God’s Ear and Jon Tracy’s adaptation of The Iliad and The Odyssey.