Reviews

Drowning Crow

| New York City |

February 19, 2004

Peter Francis James and Alfre Woodard in Drowning Crow(Photo © Joan Marcus)
Peter Francis James and Alfre Woodard in Drowning Crow
(Photo © Joan Marcus)

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 feel that little by little I am falling into a convention myself…I come more and more to the conviction that it is not a question of new and old forms, but that what matters is that a man should write without thinking about forms at all.” In Taylor’s Drowning Crow, the Treplev alter ego — called C-Trip in accordance with pervasive hip-hop influences — phrases the same conclusion in almost the same words. He says, “I’ve talked so much about new forms, and now it feels as if, little by little, I’ve fallen into the same kind of rut. Now I’m convinced it’s not about new forms or old forms, but what someone writes.”

Perhaps Taylor hasn’t heeded Treplev’s change of heart because she knew he’s only minutes away from an extremely self-destructive act and, therefore, not in his right mind. But if that was her reasoning, she’s made a gross mistake; the distressed fellow is on to something about the debilitating effect of straining after new forms. This is particularly pertinent where Taylor is concerned. Had she regarded Treplev’s conclusions as credible, she might have reached a similar realization: When form is at issue, it’s not smart to fool with Father Chekhov.

Taylor wasn’t smart. She’s taken The Seagull — frequently line by line — and decked it out with all manner of contemporary amenities. She’s got break-dancing rappers wielding cordless microphones and she’s got an especially busy Wendall K. Harrington video design busting out whenever Treplev puts a gun to his temple. In Chekhov, the gun business only occurs late in the fourth act; it happens repeatedly in Taylor’s revise and, umm, triggers a full-color-images explosion of African-American icons. Furthermore, Taylor offers a Masha figure called Mary Bow (Tracie Thoms). The character wears mourner’s black, all right, but costumer Paul Tazewell — with director Marion McClinton’s blessing, one assumes — has her in tattered black minishorts and chains. Incidentally, Mary’s dad (played by the always welcome Stephen McKinley Henderson) is called Sammy Bow. (Get it? Sammy Bow, Sam Bow, Sambo. Now, aren’t you wishing you hadn’t gotten it?)

To her credit(?), Taylor doesn’t fiddle with Chekhov’s hallowed through-line. The Arkadina stand-in, here called Josephine Nicholas Ark Trip (Alfre Woodard), has brought her lover Trigorin — here Robert Alexander Trigor (Peter Francis James) — on a visit to the country house owned by her brother (Paul Butler). While lazing about, these jaded sophisticates throw an already out-of-kilter household into further disarray. As Josephine gives the heebie-jeebies to her son C-Trip (Anthony Mackie), Trigor makes a play for the innocent Hannah Jordan (Aunjanue Ellis) simply because he can. During this languid stay and a subsequent sojourn — a year after Hannah has run off to be with Trigor — the older two cavalierly ruin the lives of the younger couple. The modus operandi of Josephine and Trigor is a kind of shared carelessness, the tragic nature of which dawns on them far too late.

Anthony Mackie and Aunjanue Ellisin Drowning Crow(Photo © Joan Marcus)
Anthony Mackie and Aunjanue Ellis
in Drowning Crow
(Photo © Joan Marcus)

Not many people would argue with Chekhov’s wryly lyrical treatment of late 19th-century Russian angst, although some might debate the doctor’s classification of The Seagull as a comedy. (Such chat would come down to semantics.) And few would argue that Chekhov’s characters aren’t recognizable types who transcend their Russian roots — or, more to the point, their sense of rootlessness. Taylor has said that she was intrigued by Chekhov’s having been descended from serfs; she felt that this gave him an understanding of slavery to which she could relate and upon which she could construct a contemporary refurbishment. But isn’t that understanding the keystone to The Seagull‘s continued relevance as written? In implying that Chekhov’s work benefits by being jerked into the 21st-century via multi-media jiggling and so on, Taylor insults both the great playwright and the audience. Deciding that today’s theatergoers need to be led into Chekhov is a form of pandering. A production of Chekhov’s venerable work with what is called a “non-traditional” cast would be far more effective because it would be far less distracting.

There’s a time and place for doing classics in modern dress, but probably less often than many directors think. Perhaps there’s even a rationale for dragging Chekhov around, although a regular theatergoer running a thumb down the list of reworked Chekhov pieces would probably find only a meager number of commendable efforts. More likely, such a thumb-runner would end up comparing worsts. Is Drowning Crow worse than last year’s Janusz Glowacki transformation of The Three Sisters into The Fourth Sister? Are they both worse than, or not as bad as, Richard Schechner’s Three Sisters revision? The truth is that these are all about equal in awfulness. But it’s a dreary contest any way you look at it because it points at a larger problem: There’s such a paucity of fresh ideas among contemporary dramatists that all many of them can do is nip at the hems of their more creative and innovative predecessors.

Because Taylor’s alterations are so superfluous, the titular crow isn’t the only creature to drown in this production. (It’s a black crow rather than a white seagull, for obvious reasons.) The actors are also up to their neck in high water. Hard as it is to believe, even the normally top-notch and always gorgeous Alfre Woodard seems to be flailing here. None of Arkadina’s passions are running through her; instead, they float just out of her grasp. Josephine talks about having appeared in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls…, as did Woodard. But ironically, this Josephine seems not to have half the Shange-interpreting potential that Woodard had. None of the rest of the ensemble scores, though many of them — Anthony Mackie, Aunjanue Ellis, Tracie Thoms — expend great effort. Peter Francis James as the manipulative Trigorin is surprising tepid. Ebony Jo-Ann, who sings a few spirituals in rumbling tones, perhaps brings the most commitment to the undertaking.

She’s not the only one rumbling. Dan Moses Schreier’s sound design begins long before the play gets going — waves crash, snatches of old songs pierce through the cacophony — and never lets up for long. Even Ken Billington’s lighting and David Gallo’s sets give a high-volume impression. Gallo’s pieces are minimal at first, large-scale silhouettes; but they become increasingly elaborate, so much so that the last of the play’s four acts (the production has only one intermission) unfolds in what looks very like a mausoleum desecrated by graffiti.

In the first act of The Seagull, Treplev has written a play that his mother deigns to attend and then cruelly mocks. Taylor, in her jimmied version, thinks it amusing to have Josephine Nicholas Ark Trip say of her son’s pretentious work, “I knew I wasn’t coming to see Chekhov.” Some Drowning Crow audience members may think they’re coming to see Chekhov, but they aren’t.

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