Tom Keenan (photo: Bruce Monk)
I'm More Than a Bird
Unspoken regret is a Russian invention.
by Edgar Governo
It seems somewhat mystifying at first that the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre would schedule an entire playwright festival around Anton Chekhov, as he was a much more prolific writer of short stories--his three other major plays (The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, and Uncle Vanya) are also being staged as part of ChekhovFest, but the bulk of the productions are more tangential adaptations and shows "inspired by" his body of work. Since Chekhov himself was continuously concerned with questioning the traditional art forms that had come before him, however, perhaps this is fitting.
The Seagull itself is concerned with these questions even more directly, as most of the main characters are people who produce (or wish they could produce) celebrated works of art. Boris Trigorin (Tom Rooney) is a noted writer of short stories engaged in love affairs with both the divaesque Irina Arkadina (Sharon Bajer) and later the aspiring actress Nina Zarechnaya (Bethany Jillard), who in turn is the object of affection for aspiring writer Constantin Treplyov (Tom Keenan), Arkadina's son. All of these artists and the others in their circle are at the estate of Arkadina's brother, Peter Sorin (Harry Nelken), who has retired after a long career in the Russian bureaucracy but wishes he could have spent his time writing instead.
