The Seagull

By: Anton ChekhovAndiBeccaJonathan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxrxeIeN-2A&feature=related

Plot

A love octagon between characters

Arkadina, a successful and famous actress, is spending the summer on her brother Sorin's country estate, accompanied by her younger lover, a successful and famous novelist, Trigorin.

Her son, Konstantin, himself an aspiring writer, has written a play which is to be performed by Nina, daughter of a neighbouring landowner, with whom he is rapturously in love. The performance mystifies the spectators and Konstantin is enraged by the frivolous attitude of his mother.

Masha, the daughter of the estate steward, Shamrayev, is secretly in love with Konstantin, but she in turn is loved by Medvedenko, the village schoolteacher. She confesses her feelings to Doctor Dorn, who himself has secretly been the lover of her mother, Polina.

Nina's feeling for Trigorin changes from admiration to adoration. Konstantin, anguished by the withdrawal of Nina's feeling for him attempts to commit suicide. Trigorin reciprocates Nina's passion, and she decides to go to Moscow to become a professional actress. She and Trigori arrange to meet there. The visitors leave.

Two years pass. Everyone is back at the estate. Konstantin has achieved some of his literary ambitions. Masha and Medvedenko are married. Trigorin has resumed his relationship with Arkadina, having ended his affair with Nina, who is now a struggling actress touring the provinces. Nina returns briefly to the neighbourhood, and while the others are at supper, Nina and Konstantin meet again.

In The Seagull, a work that the author himself claimed contained ‘‘five tons of love,’’ is a play about a very human tendency to reject love that is freely given and seek it where it is withheld

Theme: Love and Artists Chekhov does not simply write about

artists and love, he creates the embodiment of art and love on stage. Through his characters' particular personalities, Chekhov portrays the various manners of being an artist and particularly, an artist in love. All four protagonists are artists in love. Arkadina, Trigorin, Treplev, and Nina have divergent relationships with their craft and their lovers. Arkadina and Nina romanticize acting, placing it on a pedestal higher than the everyday affairs of life. Arkadina places herself on this same pedestal using her identity as an actress to excuse her vanity. Nina exalts acting as well, but, contrary to Arkadina, she endows acting with nobility, sacrifice, and privilege. In writing, Treplev compulsively paralyzes himself in the pursuit of perfection, while Trigorin obsessively gathers details from his life and the lives around him for his work without allowing the work to affect his life.

Unrequited Love

Ironically, unrequited love is the structural glue that sticks most of the characters in The Seagull together. Medvedenko loves Masha, but Masha loves Treplev. Treplev does not love Masha back, he loves Nina. Nina loves Treplev briefly but then falls madly in love with Trigorin. Arkadina loves Trigorin but loses his affections to Nina. Paulina loves Dorn though she is married to Shamrayev. Dorn sometimes shares an affection for Paulina, but his apathy for her appears to have begun before the play started and continues to fade during the course of the play. The couples and the unrequited lovers resonate and reflect off of one another, serving as parallels and mirrors of each other in the play. They represent different stages of life and of love. The clearest parallel involves Paulina and Masha. Masha's unrequited love for Treplev and decision to marry Medvedenko seems to mirror her mother's unhappy marriage to Shamrayev and her unrequited love for Dorn.

Anton Chekhov• born on 29 January 1860 in Taganrog, a port on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia• the third of six surviving children• A director of the parish choir, devout Orthodox Christian, and physically abusive father, Pavel Chekhov has been seen by some historians as the model for his son's many portraits of hypocrisy.

His Life

• mother, Yevgeniya, was an excellent storyteller who entertained the children with tales of her travels with her cloth-merchant father all over Russia• "Our talents we got from our father," Chekhov remembered, "but our soul from our mother."• attended a school for Greek boys, followed by the Taganrog gymnasium, now renamed the Chekhov Gymnasium, where he was kept down for a year at fifteen for failing a Greek exam• In 1876, Chekhov's father was declared bankrupt after over-extending his finances building a new house,[18] and to avoid the debtor's prison fled to Moscow, where his two eldest sons, Alexander and Nikolai, were attending the university• The family lived in poverty in Moscow• Chekhov was left behind to sell the family possessions and finish his education.• remained in Taganrog for three more years, boarding with a man called Selivanov who, like Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, had bailed out the family for the price of their house• Worked at many papers in order to support his family and pay his way through medical school • In 1884, Chekhov qualified as a physician,• Ended up getting tuburculosis• In America, Chekhov's reputation began its rise slightly later, partly through the influence of Stanislavski's system of acting, with its notion of subtext:

Broadway.comhttp://www.broadway.com/Spotlight-On-The-Seagull/broadway_video/5012559

NY Times Overview

Ben Brantley

- Chief theater critic

- Sophisticated style

Peter Marks

- Concise

- Humorous

Intros

Allusions

- Mathematics:

- Biology:

Humorous Criticism

Marks

Brantley

Structure

Marks

Brantley