Young at Heart

“Ebullient” is not a word one normally associates with “The Seagull,” a play in which the haunting refrain is “I’m so unhappy.” But Anton Chekhov’s brooding drama has a spring in its step in the Classic Stage Company’s compelling new production directed by Viacheslav Dolgachev of the Moscow New Drama Theatre.The familiar storm clouds still gather over that once-elegant house by the lake, where the aging diva Arkadina (Dianne Wiest) drops in on her family and her local connections. But wherever possible, Mr. Dolgachev allows the sun to peek through those clouds.His “Seagull” is framed by a whitewashed back wall and populated by men and women dressed in beige, ivory, and rose. It features a little homemade platform stage that is rolled from corner to corner of Santo Loquasto’s spare set with the zing of a car doing doughnuts in a parking lot. Even the actors make expansive use of the stage, frequently dashing on and off at top speed and calling to each other across its full breadth.For most of the production’s three hours, this breezy, informal style prevails. The 20-something characters wear period costumes but speak with contemporary inflections, like indie film stars. And it works — largely because of the delicacy and intelligence of Paul Schmidt’s fresh translation. The local schoolteacher Medvedenko (Greg Keller) has a faint slacker vibe as he guilelessly courts the black-clad Masha (Marjan Neshat), his mopey alternative girl. Arkadina’s son, the aspiring writer Kostya (Ryan O’Nan), seems like that lovable goof from your college drama group as he dashes around setting up chairs for a backyard performance of his latest play — which stars his muse, the pretty, slightly ditzy Nina (Kelli Garner).Mr. Dolgachev expertly uses the actors’ style of speaking to reinforce the dividing line between the younger and older generations — a line crucial to “The Seagull.” The children speak their minds, using language freely and impulsively. The older generation, meanwhile, speaks in formal, measured cadences, too tired to bother fighting fate any more. “You’re all so upset!” Sorin (John Christopher Jones), Arkadina’s invalid brother, says, wryly shaking his head at the dramas of youth. “All this love!”Yet if the older generation — Sorin, Arkadina, her lover Trigorin (Alan Cumming), and the family doctor, Dorn (David Rasche) — is less frantic than its youthful counterpart, it has not stopped caring. In particular, Ms. Wiest’s Arkadina — a role often played with a brittle remoteness — is unusually earthy and warm. In her performance you feel the fact that Arkadina’s life on the stage is now decidedly lacking in glamour, that she is a workhorse posing as a show pony.Ms. Wiest’s fine rapport with Mr. O’Nan, who plays Kostya, produces a poignant moment late in Act 1, as Arkadina changes the bandage that covers her son’s self-inflicted head wound. As the scene moves from raw tenderness to wrenching betrayal, two disclosures occur simultaneously: Arkadina has a steel core, and Kostya’s is easily shattered.The vital connection between Arkadina and Kostya is crucial here, since the play’s other two key relationships fail to catch fire. The trouble lies in the casting of the slim, unprepossessing Mr. Cumming as Trigorin. He’s meant to be a sexual magnet for both Arkadina and Nina, but he can’t get any chemistry going with either. (The lack is especially obvious in the case of Nina; their love scenes are conducted in unconvincingly breathless tones.)In the tricky role of Nina, the ingénue harboring a crude ambition, Ms. Garner never finds her footing. It is telling that she spends much of her time traipsing around the stage, as if trying to put as much distance as possible between herself and her suitors. It’s as if she never commits to an interpretation and spends the play vacillating between different versions of Nina.For all that, the production’s high level of execution makes it easy to recommend. Mr. Dolgachev confidently navigates the play’s slippery shifts between comedy and drama, aided by the fine work of a strikingly harmonious supporting cast (which also includes Ryan Homchick, Bill Christ, and Annette O’Toole). And he deftly moves from his early, breezy style into the somber mood of the fourth act.But the most striking thing about Mr. Dolgachev’s “Seagull” is the fresh eye he brings to its lighter underside. Many directors pay lip service to the comedy that underscores the play’s tragic moments, but Mr. Dolgachev is genuinely inspired to dig it up and show its surfaces. (Tellingly, the stage is a mirror-paneled floor.) Those weary of by-the-book classics should make their way to CSC to see Mr. Dolgachev’s attempt to make “The Seagull” relevant to a new generation — an effort entirely in the spirit of Chekhov’s play, one in which the sympathies are on the side of the young.Until April 13 (136 E. 13th St., between Third and Fourth avenues, 212-352-3101).

Young at Heart

Young at Heart

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