Sun. Feb. 1

Last call!

 A guy in plaid pants, playing an air-guitar (except it’s a rifle), on top of a stack of luggage, lip-synching along to Guns N’ Roses “Sweet Child of Mine” while more than a dozen people dance madly … Just the way, Anton Chekhov envisioned the second act of “The Seagull,” we have no doubt had there been air-guitar and Guns N’ Roses in 1896. In fact, as Hungarian director Janos Szasz told us after we saw the play on press night, he found the song in his daughter’s music collection and decided to work it in. It wasn’t exactly a random choice. (Hey, he didn’t choose “Get in the Ring,”) The volatile relationship between mother (actress Irina, played by Karen MacDonald) and son (playwright Konstantin, played by Mickey Solis) is one of multiple themes coursing through this production of the American Repertory Theatre, up at the Loeb Drama Center but closing today Sunday Feb. 1 with a 2 p.m. matinee. 

It’s also about art itself, the dilemma an artist faces about whether to set aside his own voice in order to head for mainstream. When a young actress, Nina (Molly Ward) complains to Konstantin, “It’s not easy acting in your plays. There are no ordinary people in them.” He responds that he wants to show “the way that it is in dreams. … We need new forms, and if we can’t have them, then we’re better off with no theatre at all.” In another scene, Irina calls Konstantin “a spoiled selfish child.” Of his plays, she says, “He gives us some sort of symbolist raving … a new form of art – an old form of nastiness.”

Sun. Feb. 1

Last call!

 A guy in plaid pants, playing an air-guitar (except it’s a rifle), on top of a stack of luggage, lip-synching along to Guns N’ Roses “Sweet Child of Mine” while more than a dozen people dance madly … Just the way, Anton Chekhov envisioned the second act of “The Seagull,” we have no doubt had there been air-guitar and Guns N’ Roses in 1896. In fact, as Hungarian director Janos Szasz told us after we saw the play on press night, he found the song in his daughter’s music collection and decided to work it in. It wasn’t exactly a random choice. (Hey, he didn’t choose “Get in the Ring,”) The volatile relationship between mother (actress Irina, played by Karen MacDonald) and son (playwright Konstantin, played by Mickey Solis) is one of multiple themes coursing through this production of the American Repertory Theatre, up at the Loeb Drama Center but closing today Sunday Feb. 1 with 2 p.m. matinee. 

It’s also about art itself, the dilemma an artist faces about whether to set aside his own voice in order to head for mainstream. When a young actress, Nina (Molly Ward) complains to Konstantin, “It’s not easy acting in your plays. There are no ordinary people in them.” He responds that he wants to show “the way that it is in dreams. … We need new forms, and if we can’t have them, then we’re better off with no theatre at all.” In another scene, Irina calls Konstantin “a spoiled selfish child.” Of his plays, she says, “He gives us some sort of symbolist raving … a new form of art – an old form of nastiness.”

“The Seagull” takes place on an other-worldly set, a decayed theater, with movable seats and a puddles of still water stage right. An aura of bleakness hovers about the action and the near-constant dysfunction. Konstantin’s plight, both personal and professional, is the primary concern, but there are a myriad of subplots and over-arching themes about what it means to be human in this brief time we have on earth.  It involves confrontations, external and internal. Trigorin (Brian Dykstra) is Irina’s lover, an older, famous writer who feels “all washed up and [yet] thinking of what story to write. … The cannonball starts rolling around my brain … I feel like I’m devouring my own life. … I never feel satisfied with what I write.”  He’s competitive with Konstantin, both locked in battle with Irina. He is also falling for the beautiful young Nina. As is the sick old man, Irina’s brother, Pyotr (Jeremy Geidt). And there’s Masha (Nina Kassa), a black-clad punkette who decides early on she wants to “rip love out of my heart by the  roots” and plans to do so by getting married.

For Jeremy Geidt, now 78, this is the third time he’s played the aging Pyotr, whose decline is palpable from the first to the last act. How does he get there? “It was written by Chekhov. And it’s acting,” Geidt said at the party post-show. (That is, Chekhov is master playwright, Geidt is doing his job.) Pyotr has never accomplished what he wanted to of life, and is determined to enjoy his final stretch best he can. Geidt first played this role at Yale in the mid-‘70s, then again in the early-‘90s and now -  a stretch of 30-some odd years going back to when he was not, well, old. How did he do it back then?  “I don’t remember a thing about any of them,” he says of his previous performances. “I remember one thing, the script. And this is a wonderful production and a great ensemble piece.”

“It is happiness,” says Szasz, of the play. “It is not to say it’s happy. Imagine a train at South Station, you get on and don’t know where it is taking you but you think it’s going to hell, but it’s a joy.” Szsaz is fond of using contradictions when talking about “The Seagull.” All characters display various levels of being likable and not. Your empathy shifts. “The life is unclear,” Szasz says. “Not black and white. Cheknov knew the nature of the people. It’s very complicated. It’s irrational in a way and this is what I love.”

For Karen MacDonald, this is the fourth time she’s worked with Szasz. She was most memorable as the lead in “Mother Courage and Her Children” in 2001. “He gets me,” said MacDonald, of Szasz. “We get each other. He challenges me. It’s about pushing yourself in a way. In this play, I’m an actress playing an actress – why wouldn’t you want to go as far as you can? She is completely self-involved. I’m not that way, but it’s fun to surrender yourself [to the role]. You work so hard but it doesn’t feel like you’re working your ass off. It’s all in service to the playwright.”

As to the playwright, “Chekhov sees human beings as extreme in certain situations, and it works not just in his world but today. It’s not about ‘the soul of the Russian, this is about the human condition. We wish it could change but it is what it is. This is what it feels like to be in the world. It’s not all polite. Chekhov was honest, this is what it’s like to be honest [saying0 it’s hard to be a person sometimes. Szasz would say to us “’Each of these characters is trying to find the life. How do we make it work today? Whether we succeed or fail, what we’re trying to do is keep something alive – keep it vital today.” The issue of the modern theater – its vitality in a dour economy – is implicit in this discussion.

“The Seagull” is certainly a case where the issues of the late 19th century translates into the beginning years of the 21st. Chekhov, Ssasz and his collaborators put you through the ringer, in a most engaging way. Both real and surreal, the A.R.T.’s “The Seagull” has visceral immediacy and opens the door for discussion and debate. Tickets are $79-$29

64 Brattle St., Cambridge, 617-547-8300 www.amrep.org