ABSTRACT
The performance of ‘The Seagull’, the opening bill for the fourth season of the Civic Repertory Theater, was at least fair. In such a play, made up as it is of characters so intensely set in reaction to each other and to the whole life they share, our old-time actors, of two generations ago, would in some respects have done better. They understood how to put an edge on their personages, to make them stand clear and go straight over the footlights. Technically they were much more equipped than these present-day actors that we see on Fourteenth Street. But at the same time these players of the old school would never have understood what it was all about, and could never by the wildest chance have contrived to subordinate themselves to the subtler meaning and exchange of the play. Our new stage is in the right direction for Chekhov, but the actors have not enough technical security for these natural effects in a deeper sense, not enough private prayer for the flavor of their own souls, not enough playing together in a company, to get the flow and quiver of this dramatist or to create, as he willed it, the antiphonal shine and poignancy of the life set before us.
