The Seagull and Other Birds
Opening Night: March 23, 2016
Closing: April 2, 2016
Theater: Abrons Arts Center Henry Street Settlement
“The Seagull and Other Birds” is a roller coaster reimagining of Anton Chekhov’s much-loved comic masterpiece. The performance centers around a concise new version of “The Seagull” integrated with a number of works specially commissioned by the company. Through the wormhole of the new work, Chekhov’s characters find themselves in extraordinarily different contexts: classic plays, TV shows, YouTube and stuff they’ve just made up. The result is playful and uncompromising – expect lots of talk about art, some action, and tons of love.
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March 27, 2016
You’ll recognize Masha right away. True, she’s wearing standard-issue ballet gear like everybody else. But her tutu is black. And it’s not long — shortly after the audience is encouraged to help sing a curtain-raising rendition of the Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” — before she clinches the identification with her immortal signature line: “I’m in mourning for my life.” Otherwise, it may take you a while to figure out which unhappy Chekhov character is which in “The Seagull and Other Birds,” wherein the experimental Irish troupe Pan Pan turns one of modern drama’s great seminal works upside down, inside out and every which way but loose. For one thing, the thwarted souls of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” are never quite themselves in this giddy act of theatrical implosion, which opened this weekend at the Abrons Arts Center. They may often speak the familiar dialogue of those well-known anguished Russians Arkadina, Konstantin, Nina, Sorin and Trigorin (as well as mopey Masha), albeit with a fresh peppering of Anglo-Saxon obscenities.
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