Word: trigorin
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Dates: during 1938-1938
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...Chekhov's best play, The Sea Gull ranks well below his incomparable Cherry Orchard, his moving Three Sisters. The people it treats of are fibreless, end-stopped artistic folk. Self-pitying, middle-aged Actress Irina (Lynn Fontanne) shrugs, screams, clutches tight the second-rate novelist, Trigorin (Alfred Lunt). Irina's son Constantine (Richard Whorf) writes advanced plays, loves the ingenuous, stage-struck Nina (Uta Hagen), who in turn idolizes Trigorin. Nina is the sea gull- the fluttering bird whom Trigorin ruins out of thoughtless pleasure, condemning her to the life of a third-rate actress, driving Constantine...
...glibly referring to The Sea Gull as a tragedy of frustration. But the play is tragicomedy, impaling human foibles as well as hearts. Tender but ruthless, The Sea Gull smiles upon the too-utterly-utter side of the artistic temperament, reflects the conflict between two incompatible generations. It exposes Trigorin's rueful egotism: "On my tombstone," says Trigorin, "they will say: Here lies Trigorin, who was a good writer, but not so good a one as Turgenev." It exposes Nina's swimming-eyed romanticism. Chekhov suggested, though Actor Lunt has not heeded him, that Trigorin should...
Throughout The Sea Gull sounds a deeper note also, telling of human growth and decline. The shallow Trigorin and the histrionic Irina end up playing lotto. But Nina grows, as one superb device reveals: in Act I, performing in a play of Constantine's she speaks his highfalutin but charged lines mechanically; in Act IV she repeats them, makes them live. It is in delimiting his characters without disfiguring them, in acknowledging their souls but questioning their perspective that Chekhov gives to The Sea Gull a kind of ember like glow...
...glow shines through the present production. Critic Stark Young's new acting version is natural and charming, but last week's performance showed only a series of moods-that time-honored way of passing the buck about the dark, difficult Russian soul. Actor Lunt performed admirably as Trigorin, Actress Fontanne badly as Irina. She made the Russian woman a ham actress in a farce, displayed a rather alarming affinity for the role...