Chekhov’s Gull

Over the past few years, Anton Chekhov’s plays have been adapted to reflect present concerns in numerous productions. Dmitry Krymov’s direction of The Cherry Orchard for the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia in 2022 used a giant train board to supply some of the text as the characters fell away, EgoPo’s production of Reza de Wet’s Three Sisters Two in 2019 moved the action to the 1920s and used expansive gender re-casting, and even Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird at the Pearl in New York in 2016 updated The Seagull by making it a metatheatrical commentary on being a contemporary artist. These and others all reveal that the American theatre scene is still finding relevant and resonant source material in Chekhov’s tales of unhappy Russians stuck in between the lives their parents and grandparents lived and their own desires. It is no surprise that the playwright, famous for writing stories about waiting and dissatisfaction, has popped into the collective psyche as past and present quarantines have taught us new lessons about who we become when we are stuck in collective limbo. These are the circumstances that conditioned Elevator Repair Service’s take on their production of Seagull at NYU’s large Skirball Center.