Review: THE SEAGULL at RONIN THEATRE COLLABORATIVE
Chekhov's arguments about art fade into something more enduring: the people who make them.
Every theatre company eventually has to decide what it wants from the classics.
Some preserve them like sacred relics. Others reinvent them. Ronin Theatre Collaborative has built its identity around discovering new voices while returning to established plays in search of something immediate.
That makes THE SEAGULL an especially revealing choice. Before anyone falls in love or suffers disappointment, Chekhov's play argues about theatre itself. Konstantin insists the old forms have failed. More than a century later, directors are still answering him.
Director Cody Goulder answers by bringing the play into the present. Contemporary clothes replace period dress. A cellphone briefly appears. Pop culture occasionally enters the dialogue. None of those choices struck me as especially consequential. The production changes Chekhov's surroundings more than it changes the play. Once the characters' emotional lives took hold, the concept receded altogether.
That was not my expectation.
For a second, I worried the casual vibe might lead to a lazy performance. Ronin earns the audience's confidence the old-fashioned way: by making us believe the people at the center of the story.
That begins with Konstantin, Nina, and Trigorin.
If that triangle fails, The Seagull becomes an interesting discussion about theatre. If it succeeds, the play reminds us that every argument about art is also an argument about love, recognition, and the impossible desire to become someone else's answer.
Alex Bookish never separates Konstantin's artistic ambitions from his emotional ones. His plea for "new forms" is not so much a manifesto as the hope that Nina—and perhaps his mother—will finally see him. Toni Martin-Hanson gives Nina an openness that makes both Konstantin's devotion and Trigorin's fascination entirely believable. She resists sentimentalizing Nina, allowing experience to reshape her without ever hardening her.
Chekhov insisted The Seagull was a comedy, and he would approve of Friday night’s laughs. The ensemble never chases those laughs. Instead, it leads the audience to notice what the characters cannot. People enter conversations convinced they understand themselves, each other, and the future. The audience recognizes the mistake before they do.
Kate Haas and Dhan Kumar understand that Chekhov wrote complex villains. Haas refuses to reduce Arkadina to theatrical vanity, revealing instead a woman whose confidence is inseparable from her fear of losing it.
Kumar drives Trigorin's attraction to Nina at a slow, intentional pace, allowing the enchantment to arise almost accidentally. One conversation lasts a little longer than the last. A glance lingers. By the time Trigorin returns to Arkadina in Act 2, he retreats to the life he already knows. Kumar neither condemns nor excuses him. He simply lets us watch a man unequal to the consequences of his own desires, choosing the path of least resistance.
Ronin extends the same attention to the rest of Chekhov's world. Robert Peters makes Sorin the one relative everyone instinctively gathers around. Kevin Herman's Dorn carries the composure of someone who understands people well enough to know they rarely change. Melody Knudson plays Masha as a woman who has grown accustomed to wanting what she can't have. Michelle Luz conveys Polina's years of accumulated frustration without overstating it, while Carlin Thomas establishes Shamraev's authority before he speaks a line simply by the way he enters a room.
The intimate space at Main Street Creative Arts Center suits Ronin's ambitions. The audience remains close enough to catch the smallest shifts in behavior. The lighting occasionally leaves private conversations visually exposed, missing opportunities to isolate moments that deserve greater focus. That’s less a critique of the design than a reality of the venue’s limited equipment.
When Konstantin argues that theatre needs new forms, he assumes innovation begins with style.
Ronin Theatre Collaborative makes a more modest case. The hardest challenge has never been inventing something new. It has always been persuading an audience to believe in another human being, regardless of form.
By the end of the evening, the company had done exactly that.
THE SEAGULL, by Anton Chekhov, continues through July 19. It plays at Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival on August 14-15.
For tickets, visit: https://ronintheatreco.net/
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