It may be that, in adapting Anton Chekhov's The Seagull to South Carolina gullah territory, Regina Taylor took encouragement from the Russian playwright himself. At one point in the first act of the Chekhov piece, which the author considered a comedy, the impassioned young writer Constantine Treplev runs off at the mouth about the theater requiring new forms. By the fourth act, Treplev -- who's failed to capture his mother's approval and has also lost his girlfriend to his mother's lover -- is singing a different tune.

In the edition of The Seagull that I pulled from my shelf (for which no translator is credited), the recantation line goes: "I have talked so much about new forms and now I f[...]