TT: A noisy Seagull

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the new Broadway production of The Seagull and a very rare revival by Chicago’s Strawdog Theatre Company of Karel Capek’s R.U.R.. I had fair-to-partly-cloudy feelings about The Seagull, but R.U.R. knocked me out. Here’s an excerpt.
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It’s been eight years since any play by Anton Chekhov was last seen on Broadway, and 15 since Tony Randall’s National Actors Theatre performed “The Seagull” there. So the arrival in town of the Royal Court Theatre’s highly praised production of 2007, in which Kristin Scott Thomas (“The English Patient”) plays Arkadina, ought to be cause for celebration. Sure enough, Ian Rickson has given us a carefully considered staging, one that makes sense on paper–yet I never managed to warm up to it, or felt myself drawn into Chekhov’s world, in which comedy and tragedy are tied together so tightly that you can’t tell them apart.
Not until well into the second act did I figure out what was bothering me. Especially in Christopher Hampton’s new English-language version, this is a very British “Seagull,” but not in the pale, old-fashioned way: I’ve never seen a production of “The Seagull” that was played so successfully, even relentlessly, for laughs. Up to a point this is as it should be, but Mr. Rickson’s staging is over-emphatic and overly detailed, often to the point of outright fussiness. Nobody throws anything away–every moment is made to register–and much of the play’s poignancy, at least for me, got lost in the resulting clutter. Compared to the Classic Stage Company’s recent Off-Broadway “Seagull,” which was as intimate as it was immediate, this production struck me as both too big and (so to speak) too noisy….
The word “robot” was introduced to the world by the Czech playwright Karel Capek in “R.U.R.,” a play that was first performed in 1921 and ran for four performances on Broadway in 1942. Now you know all I knew about “R.U.R.” when I went to see it in Chicago last week. It is, to be sure, known by name to most people with a serious interest in science fiction or Central European drama, but I’d never seen it on stage, nor has it been professionally performed in this country at any time in my memory. I went partly out of curiosity and partly because I was so impressed by Strawdog Theatre Company’s electrifying 2007 production of Brian Friel’s “Aristocrats” that I wanted to see if it had been a fluke. I’m happy to report that lightning struck twice: Strawdog’s “R.U.R.” is a major revival of a play that turns out to be far more than a mere historical curiosity.
“R.U.R.” is a tale of modernity run amok, the story of Rossum’s Universal Robots, an island factory that manufactures lifelike but soulless artificial humans in vast quantities, then ships them all over Europe to grateful purchasers who use them to do their dirty work. This being science fiction, things inevitably go wrong: Dr. Gall (John Henry Roberts), one of the white-coated scientists in the employ of Rossum’s Universal Robots, makes the fatal mistake of building a few hundred robots that can feel emotions, upon which all hell breaks well and truly loose….
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Read the whole thing here.