A Seagull in the Hamptons Soars in First Act, But Takes a Dive After Intermission
Nick Moore, Contributing Writer
Monday, March 29, 2010
The Daily Californian

The first half of the Shotgun Players' A Seagull in the Hamptons is one of the best hours of Bay Area theater seen this year. The set, rotated 45 degrees so as to jut out into the audience, consists of a wooden boardwalk placed on what must be a few tons of sand. The setting is, convincingly, a private beach on Long Island, where expensive wine, Polo shirts and a generally high-brow attitude can't hide some serious familial dysfunction.

Alex, an immediately intense teenager, assembles various friends and family members on the beach to witness his one-act play. Starring his girlfriend Nina, it's a bizarre lamentation of man's destructive nature. It fails badly, interrupted by Alex's flamboyant audience, including his mother Maria, an actress who thinks she's always onstage.

A Seagull in the Hamptons is a rewrite of the Anton Chekhov play The Seagull, and closely follows its story. Alex becomes distraught over his dismal play and the way his mother fawns over her boyfriend Philip, an esteemed writer and acknowledged playboy. When Nina begins to fall out of love with Alex and into it with Philip, the story gets complicated, dramatic and ultimately very sad.

The brilliance of A Seagull's first half lays in the way its dialogue slowly but efficiently unveils its characters' tortured psyches. A day or so after Alex's play, Nina and Philip find themselves alone on the beach, locked in a conversation in which sexuality stops just short of including physical contact.

While Nina looks like a sweetly innocent teen and Philip like a confident author, the dialogue-delivered as the two move about the stage in a sensual choreography-reveals each to suffer from inescapable neuroses. Philip admits, perhaps providing a window into Chekhov's own mind, that no matter what he does, one thought possesses him: "I should be writing right now." By intermission, all of the main characters appear to be veritable bags of anxiety.

The play's second half takes place two years into a bleaker future. The same characters are present, arranged around a card table at the same Long Island estate. They recount the last two years-the troubled romances and career fluctuations-in a suspenseless, deflating manner. While the early scenes unfold with purpose and precision, here the dialogue develops the plot rather than the characters.

The actors, who are generally fantastic, can't resuscitate this section. As the tension dies the characters lose the complexity that had been painstakingly granted them, becoming familiar caricatures-the misunderstood artist, the shallow actress, the regretful old man. Part of the problem may be that in the years since the play was written, these characters, which may have seemed fresh in 1895, have become cliches.

The pursuit on everyone's mind is talent-a word that is uttered often and with a kind of reverence. Alex, seeing the way Maria and Nina flock to Philip, hopes he has what it takes to make it big in the literary world, while Nina wonders whether she has a future in acting. Though these people seem fairly rich, talent and critical success is what really makes them salivate. They are greedy for what their money cannot buy them. Echoing the famously unfulfilling nature of wealth, critical success fails to satisfy these obsessive Long Islanders. As David Foster Wallace wisely said, those who worship tangibles-be they success or talent-will never have enough. Apparently Chekhov agrees.