Wandering about between Moscow and New York
What is freedom? What does it mean in art and in life? How does it feel, how does it taste? Is it Nina’s dream of the stage? Is it Treplev’s restless breaking away from artistic convention? These questions haunted so many, including young Chekhov writing The Seagull.
More than a century later, Russian director Alexander Molochnikov revisits these questions with urgent immediacy in Seagull: True Story, co-created with writer Eli Rarey under the suffocating socio-political climate of Russia in 2022, when freedom, in both art and life, became piercingly visible.
Set in Moscow in early 2022, the play follows young director Kon (Daniel Boyd), whose dream of staging a radical Seagull is shattered by Putin’s “special military operation.” His openly speaks against the regime, leading him into exile in New York, leaving behind his mother Olga (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) and his dramaturg Anton (Elan Zafir) to clean up the mess. In the Big Apple, the capital of the capitalist, liberal empire, Kon meets Broadway producer Barry (Andrey Burkovskiy) and actor Nico (Stella Baker), with whom he seems to continue chasing his artistic dream.
To some extent, Seagull: True Story especially speaks to those who have embodied living experiences of double ideologies: growing up in a post-Soviet, socialist society but are greatly affected by (neo)liberalism in the 90s and early 2000s. For them, Russia and the US are not two extreme poles on the political spectrum, but strangely fused and reflective. One seems to respect art and artists only on the condition of their submission to the regime; the other is represented by a single $900 Broadway ticket and numerous anonymous off-off-off-off-off-off Broadway theatre makers.
But how far are these two worlds, really? Or are they just two points of a horseshoe? Kon leaves for the US where he believes freedom lies, having no idea that two years later, it will once again welcome Donald Trump’s reincarnation. But is it just Trump? Maybe, he is just an amplifier of a system claiming to be the most ideal and free so long as you subject yourself to the power of money. What left for Kon, is the even more perplexing freedom. The freedom Kon craves so much eventually comes off like cold, hard leftover food, hardly enough to satisfy his artistic hunger.
The metatheatrical layers unfold smoothly, energised by Burkovskiy as the MC and an ensemble of ten. The production feels like a whirlwind tour of the last decade of Western theatre with rich directorial approaches juxtaposing its absurdity and nostalgia at the same time: snowball fights with “Lenin” on Red Square, a Kit Kat Club–style disco dream with Putin (choreographed by Ohad Mazor), and a parody immersive theatre Three Little Pigs. Underscored by Fedor Zhuravlev and Julian Starr’s sensational music and sound design, Nostalgia, irony, and absurdity collapse into one another.
The love story between Kon and Nico, however, feels too filmic and clichéd, unconvincing from my point of view. It is more a device to demonstrate Kon’s own sense of getting lost. The true emotional tie in this story, I reckon, lies in between Kon and Anton who is both his dramaturg and life mentor, where Kon’s conscience lies. The goldfish with a balloon – a gift from Anton – is what Kon can hold onto when he gets entirely lost in-between Russia and America, between these two values and two ways of lives.
So when Anton dies, Kon is completely lost. American capitalist freedom promises everything if you sell yourself like a whore. Russian authoritarianism offers him what he wants because his mother is Olga, but at the same time, countless Antons are arrested, detained, or murdered. Just as Anton says, he can always meet more interesting people in the jail than in a cafe. At this point, Kon is both Nina and Treplev. The Seagull becomes a metatheatrical, new historical Chekov’s gun, eventually fires after more than a century.
Kon doesn’t jump off the NYC subway platform, and this time, Nico isn’t there. Instead, he falls into the arms of Burkovskiy, dancing with him in a dreamlike paradise, indulging himself in any sort of (dis)illusion. It no longer matters who Burkovskiy is performing, the stage manager of Moscow Arts Theatre, the flamboyant Broadway Producer, or, the MC of this story. Kon is just so lost, in Russia, in America, in theatre and in art, down the intriguing yet treacherous road to freedom.