First, a word about the summer.

The sun outside doesn’t seem to know it’s September, but everyone else does. Everyone else is BACK, planning meetings, sending messages, getting around to all the things they said they’d get around to after Labor Day. (What did we do, I wonder, before Labor Day – what was the demarcation line from the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer and the back-to-business rolling-up-of-sleeves?) I had big plans for the summer – not just writing plans, but entertainment plans. Theater. Outdoor concerts. Outdoor films, with picnics in the twilight. Indulging myself in the ripe cornucopia of free culture that is New York in the summer.

But instead, I was promoted. At my day job. One picnic, work-related. One trip out west, also work-related. One film in a cinema – “Boy A” – British, bleak, brilliant, and more needful of my $11 than “The Dark Knight.”

No theater. No concerts. Such are the perils of adulthood.

And now we face the Fall! Season! I get fliers fliers fliers in the mail (stop! Save the environment!) One fell from the mailbox to the floor and there was a photo of Kristen Scott Thomas – oh, how nice, what’s she in?

The Seagull.

Oh no.

With Peter Sarsgaard.

No, no, please. Stop.

I promised myself that when I reached a certain age – and I have reached it -- that I wouldn’t have to see Chekhov anymore. As much as Shakespeare fires me up, Chekhov leaves me cold. It was that way at my first job – “job” in the sense that I had to show up and do things but received no salary – I was paid in theater – where I ushered The Cherry Orchard? The Three Sisters? Both? And I thought, wow, if I want to see miserable people moaning about some idealized past and taking no action whatsoever, well, I could have stayed home and listened to my father.

On to college, where the self-enamored, teenager-seducing playwriting teacher (or is all that redundant) took us through The Three Sisters line by bloody line. “And then Irina comes in and declares she has forgotten the Italian word for `window’ – Elizabeth, play attention.” Later, the same teacher took me to a performance of The Seagull at The Public Theater – Christopher Walken, Rosemary Harris, Blythe Danner. I didn't like it. I felt ashamed. Later still, drama major classmates asked me to critique their monologues; inevitably, they were Nina from The Seagull (“I didn’t know what to do with my hands!”) or Sonya from Uncle Vanya (“What a pity she’s so plain!”)

Which is to say, I’ve seen Chekhov performed well and I’ve seen Chekhov performed badly and I just. Don’t. Get it. I feel like Ricky Gervais in the poster for Ghost Town: “He sees dead people … and they annoy him.”

So fine, so don’t go see The Seagull.

Then I received the “Fall Preview” issue of New York magazine (“Summer is over! Back to work!”) and saw that the Nina in the Kristen Scott Thomas/Peter Sarsgaard Seagull (as though Kristen Scott Thomas and Peter Sarsgaard were not enough) is Carey Mulligan.

Who?

Carey Mulligan. A British actress – one of the giggling little sisters in the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice, the heartbreaking Ada Clair in the Gillian Anderson Bleak House, Sally Sparrow in a particularly winning episode of Dr. Who, the sister, the daughter in random BBC things – no, you haven’t heard of her, because you get out more, you actually had a real summer. But she’s one of my pet actresses and the question is, for her sake, must I sit through another Seagull?

Labels: actors, Chekhov

posted by Elizabeth at 10:50 AM