The Seagull<\/a>, in interpretations ranging from heartfelt to radical to ridiculous, this is an original script by Eli Rarey. But the way Molochnikov and Rarey refract Chekhov through both the broadest of humor and our modern, globally interconnected, social-media-mediated world gives a new lens into Chekhovian tone: Rueful farce meets existential despair meets a recognition of the farcical, performative qualities of that despair. The sincere yearning for a meaningful life crashes against the tendency of fragile ideals to deflate into pragmatic compromise; principle clashes with self-interest, and self-interest always wins.\u00a0<\/p>\nEven the most heartfelt moments are more than a little tongue-in-cheek; we\u2019re never watching The Seagull so much as watching an artist who\u2019s obsessed with The Seagull\u2013and obsessed with being the kind of artist who\u2019s obsessed with The Seagull\u2013while also grappling with the questions raised in The Seagull about the value of art in a commercialized world, and whether there is any true freedom to be found through artistic expression. \u201cI can\u2019t explain it. I just feel that this was so meta,\u201d says the manager of the Moscow Art Theater about an ecstatic freedom dance at the end of one of the internal Seagulls, and he\u2019s not wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Like both Molochnikov himself and Konstantin, the melodramatic young hero of Chekhov\u2019s Seagull, Kon (Eric Tabach) is a hotshot young director at the Moscow Art Theater. He\u2019s directing an avant-garde Seagull\u2013with his mother, Olga (Zuzanna Szadkowski), playing the leading role of Arkadina (who is also an actress who\u2019s the mother of an avant-garde theater director; it\u2019s meta all the way down)\u2013when Russia invades Ukraine in February 2022. One of his cast members (Quentin Lee Moore) is reflexively pro-war; others are fully against. Olga and the theater\u2019s manager, Yuri (Andrey Burkovsky, the piece\u2019s buffoonishly brilliant master of ceremonies, who plays multiple roles of the narrator\/deus ex machina type), are trying to walk a middle ground, albeit for slightly different reasons: Olga\u2019s willing to capitulate just enough to keep her job and stay more-or-less safe; Yuri is a pragmatist for whom ethics are a trivial luxury. \u201cNo one cares what you believe, what you think, what you want!\u201d he berates Kon. But when Kon first refuses to sign a document transferring the rights of his piece to the theater and promising to revise the play \u201cin the event of changes in public sentiment,\u201d and then accidentally-on-purpose-while-stoned uploads an Instagram post criticizing Putin, he books a fast flight to New York, leaving his best friend\/dramaturg, Anton (Elan Zafir), to speak out against the war. While the nepo baby runs off to take refuge with his mother\u2019s friend Barry (Burkovsky again), a commercial producer in New York, the less-well-connected poet lands in prison.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the land of the free is also the land where commercialism is king; Barry is delighted to meet Kon, but could not be less interested in funding his \u201cvisionary\u201d work. No, Barry is interested in the \u201cfamily-friendly avant-garde\u201d: an immersive, virtual-reality inflected Three Little Pigs musical at an event space in Bushwick. So Kon, after being rescued by an actress on a subway platform (Gus Birney) and whisked off to her artists\u2019 commune in Bushwick, is going to have to make his own art with his new love and her friends.<\/p>\n
The targets of Molochnikov and Rarey\u2019s satire are often low-hanging fruit, but they\u2019re not letting anyone off the hook: Not the repressive Russian government, with Putin\u2019s ridiculous self-inflated masculinity delightfully lampooned by Burkovsky and a group of dancers performing as a horse. Not an America that\u2019s catching up to it by the day; the comments on the early days of the war in Ukraine are eerily reminiscent of this moment, even down to \u201cyou\u2019re not allowed to call it a war.\u201d Not the smarmy gloss of commercial theater that wants to have its avant-garde cake and eat it too. Not the feckless self-righteousness of the Bushwick squatter set.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s important to note that the lens is also turned on Kon himself, who\u2019s all too willing to advertise that he\u2019s standing on principle even as the line between his egotism, his privilege, and his principles blurs into invisibility. He\u2019s the one, after all, who has enough resources and institutional power to get himself on a fast flight to New York and finagle enough of a visa to be allowed into the country in the first place. The question of Kon\u2019s actual talent remains for me open throughout\u2014in Moscow he\u2019s both nepo baby and wunderkind. In New York, while the ways that his commune\/company objects to non-inclusive language choices in Chekhov are played for satire, they also show us a director who is not at all in charge of the room. I am choosing to believe that this satire is self-aware, that part of the play\u2019s \u201ctrue story\u201d is the way that our engagement with the actual tragedy\u2013the war, the exodus of people of conscience as free expression is penalized\u2013is undermined time and time again by Kon\u2019s willingness to make the self-aggrandizing choice.<\/p>\n
Molochnikov, fortunately, is a talented director, though perhaps more so with the production\u2019s physical elements than its actors. The piece\u2019s presentational elements are often its most effective. Sound (by Diego Las Heras) and music (composed by Aydur Gaynullin, Maestro Gorsky, Noize MC, and Fedor Zhuravlev, and performed live by Zhuravlev, as well as musical numbers performed by the cast) are used as elements of structure and punctuation; the use of handheld microphones helps underscore the piece\u2019s complex relationship with the fourth wall. Alexander Shishkin\u2019s set, with two gently lit dressing tables as its most tangible elements and its larger pieces made visibly from cardboard, adds to that \u201clet\u2019s put on a show\u201d quality.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The performances vary, though: Zafir\u2019s Anton, understated throughout, becomes the moral center through his very simplicity. Burkovsky, in entirely the opposite tack, is always extra, but the sharp edge of sardonic self-awareness never softens. (He and David Turner\u2019s Mother Russia character in the recently closed Mother Russia have a lot in common.) But Tabach\u2019s Kon flounders; I think the play is stronger if we believe his artistic vision alongside his willingness to compromise it, but I didn\u2019t, quite.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Unlike Chekhov, Rarey doesn\u2019t invest much energy in either of his leading women: Nico is little more than her beauty and her status as muse for Kon\u2013which she does call him out on at the end, but it\u2019s too little, too late\u2013and while Nina-as-manic-pixie-dream-waif is very much in Gus Birney\u2019s wheelhouse, there\u2019s not a lot of there there. And Zuzanna Szadkowski\u2019s Olga spends most of her time trying to wrangle Kon into a better position.<\/p>\n
There is a certain theatrical energy that\u2019s unleashed by being exactly as cutting toward the social-justice-warrior impulses of Kon\u2019s cast of young creatives as toward Putin, but it does flatten the stakes for those actually living with the consequences of their conscience: notably Anton. Anton, in his way, is as much of a pragmatist as Yuri\u2013but one who takes that stance to an entirely different conclusion: everything but ethics has become a trivial luxury in the face of war. If there\u2019s no way out (Kon offers to take Anton to New York with him, but Anton recognizes New York doesn\u2019t need a dramaturg who speaks no English), then plainly stating that \u201cwe have been rehearsing while people are dying\u201d is the only path. Seagull: True Story acknowledges that path, but doesn\u2019t really walk down it. Its acknowledgment of human cowardice may be one of the most Chekhovian things about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eric Tabach and Elan Zafir in Seagull: True Story. Photo: Kir Simakov If, like too many American theatergoers,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185487,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":{"0":"post-185486","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-ny","10":"tag-nyc","11":"tag-nyc-headlines","12":"tag-nyc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185486\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Eric](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/KIR1532-scaled.jpeg\")
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