Bird Talk

Anton Chekhov isn’t Shakespeare, but the Russian playwright’s late nineteenth-century plays can still leave one with that stranger-in-a-strange-land feeling. 

“It’s a hard play to read, isn’t it?” said Risa Brainin, chair and director of performance in the Department of Theater and Dance at UC Santa Barbara, about Anton Chekhov’s first play, The Seagull. “If you don’t know what’s underneath the language, the language doesn’t mean anything. And that’s why it’s hard to read. When you read Seagull, you’re like, ‘I don’t know if I get it.’ 

“I always say with Chekhov, the words are the tip of the iceberg. And until you build the iceberg, the words are meaningless.”

Brainin is one half of a director duo who will be working on a unique theatrical event that will be produced by Baton Rouge professional theater company Swine Palace this spring as part of its twenty-fifth anniversary season. And thankfully, reading won’t be required. The event, a logistically and creatively ambitious project, will take the form of rotating repertory. 

Though this will be Swine Palace’s first production in the format, rotating rep is a standard form of theatrical presentation that involves performance of different plays on alternating nights or even on the same night, allowing audiences to experience related productions in rapid succession. This provides opportunities to compare and contrast plays whose contemporaneous production can bring focus to issues that might not be obvious if each play was presented alone. In Swine Palace’s case, The Seagull will rotate with a 2013 adaptation of the original, written by Aaron Posner and called Stupid F***ing Bird, which Brainin will direct. Colorado-based theatre director Gavin Cameron-Webb will direct The Seagull. 

Booed at its debut performance, The Seagull was misunderstood by audiences of its own time. It was Chekhov’s first play. He had enjoyed great success as a short story writer, but the production of this theatrical effort was not received kindly, thanks in part to Chekhov’s unusual approach. 

Cameron-Webb, who has directed productions for the Delaware Theatre Company, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, explained that Russians were used to vaudeville-like variety shows, situation comedies, and classics. Then along came Chekhov, who did three unusual things in The Seagull: He fully developed each character in the ensemble, giving each equal importance rather than structuring the play with lead and supporting roles; he didn’t try to make broad societal statements with his work; and all of his characters were fully-developed emotional creatures, not one-dimensional heroes or villains. 

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“All his characters are recognizable humans, recognizable people. You’ve met them,” said Cameron-Webb. 

The play, a tragicomedy of the sort that Chekhov is famous for, follows a cast of characters over the course of two years, with the first three acts occurring during one summer and the last act taking place two years later. The small group suffers love triangles, bitter familial relationships, and creative contests. “There is a kind of complacency and struggle to [the characters], and they don’t really know what they’re struggling about,” said Cameron-Webb.

"Life is a performance," said the Seagull to the Stupid F***ing Bird.

The Bird replied, "Get real."

Chekov’s then-original approach would have been reason enough for the audience to balk on opening night, but, as Cameron-Webb explained, the deck was pretty stacked. “It was badly miscast and they only had a week’s rehearsal and [the cast] didn’t understand the play and the audience was expecting a tribute [to an actress] and a rollicking farce. So they [the audience] were really upset.”

It’s this history that makes Swine Palace’s vision so intriguing. As regular theatre-goers well know, contemporizing a piece of classic theatre often makes its characters and themes much more understandable, and this is certainly the case with Stupid F***ing Bird, which, according to Brainin, pushes Chekhov’s subtext straight to the surface (where it sort of explodes in your face … a lot of unguarded oversharing).   

Posner’s idiomatic, completely twenty-first-century version can stand on its own merits, though. Brainin explained, “This is not a parody. This actually investigates. I think it sort of investigates more of the backstory of The Seagull, and it also really looks at what [the character] Konstantin/Con is trying to do, which is ‘Let’s be real. Let’s be in the moment. Let’s get rid of artifice in theatre.’” Contrast that with Cameron-Webb’s approach, which will be to play Seagull more theatrically. “I’m looking at it as if through a perspective that ‘life is a performance.’” 

The focus of both plays on the subject of “the Theatre” is certainly reason enough to plan their side-by-side production around the major anniversary of a professional repertory theatre, but Swine Palace’s Managing Director Kristin Sosnowsky said that this hallmark year was also a good time to up the ante. 

“One of the things that we try and do is challenge ourselves and challenge our audiences and bring great theatre to Baton Rouge, and this is something that we haven’t really done on this scale, to my knowledge, maybe ever in the company’s history,” said Sosnowsky.

Swine Palace, founded in 1991 and named after the small-livestock exhibition hall that later became the Reilly Theatre (one of two theaters in which Swine Palace performs), is one of only eighteen or so resident professional theatre companies in the U.S. associated with a university, according to Sosnowsky. A key component of Swine Palace’s mission is to provide professional-level opportunities to the MFA theatre students at LSU. So, in addition to the seven guest actors who are being hired for the cast, nine LSU students will also join the billing, receiving the singular opportunity of playing the same character in both plays.  

Not only that, but Seagull and Bird have not, as far as anyone’s aware, been performed in rotating rep. “I think it’s a wonderful idea because each performance will complement the other play and illuminate it and offer a different perspective,” said Cameron-Webb. “You’ll see one and you’ll see the other, and then all sorts of parallels will leap into focus for you.” 

Swine Palace will be celebrating its anniversary with a gala celebration on January 20. To be held at the LSU Faculty Club, the night will include performances of featured scenes from Swine Palace’s hallmark productions. $75 per person or $125 for a couple. 

The Seagull and Stupid F***ing Bird will rotate from March 22—April 7 at the Reilly Theatre. Get your tickets at swinepalace.org.