Leaving campus in the middle of the semester has left countless parts of the Hamilton experience unfulfilled: championships cancelled, thesis research halted, and friendships cut short by social distancing. The Theatre Department has adapted to the cancellation of its spring Mainstage by creating a new project titled “The Seagull You Never Saw.”
The mainstage play was originally
The Seagull
, a Chekhov classic in an adaption by Anya Reiss, directed by Professor of Theatre Jeanne Willcoxon. The play revolves around the unattainable love and betrayal among four protagonists: brooding playwright Konstantin (Jack Clark ’21), his aspiring actress Nina (Ndanu Mutisya ’21), Konstantin’s mother and aging actress Irina Arkadina (myself, Sarah Gyurina ’22), and her lover, the famous writer Boris Trigorin (Ben Leit ’22).
The play follows the characters as they are isolated at Judge Petrusha Sorin’s (Will Kaback ’20) estate in the countryside, where poor teacher Medvenko (Simon Stringer ’23) covets Masha (Ashley Huntington ’20), who in turn yearns for Konstantin’s love. Masha’s mother, Polina (Rebekah Fowler ’21) is dissatisfied with her marriage to Shamrayev (William Benthem de Grave ’20) and instead loves Dorn, the doctor (Robbie Lane ’20). The cycles of unrequited love are plentiful and sorrowful.
The day that the first of the NESCAC schools began announcing their decisions to close, panic circulated around the campus. My fellow actors and I were anxious and our rehearsals felt moot — what’s the point if we might not come back?
Yet our director, Jeanne Willcoxon, told us that until President Wippman officially announced the cancelling of on-campus learning, she would continue to run rehearsals as normal. “I was full-steam ahead with our live performance,” she wrote to me. “We were just getting to the place where we really dig into the life of the play.”
So when Wippman announced that classes would shift to remote learning following break, the cast and crew felt brokenhearted — especially the seniors, who would never again experience a Hamilton Mainstage.
“I was devastated when the performance couldn’t happen,” assistant director Maggie Luddy ’20, wrote. “This was my last Mainstage and not getting to finish it out was definitely upsetting.” Willcoxon cancelled rehearsal that day and the cast and crew unofficially met together one last time to commemorate the production.
But as the saying goes, the show must go on. Pondering a solution, Willcoxon wrote, “I was outside of KSTA thinking and suddenly the thought came into my head of ‘The Seagull You Never Saw.’”
She brought her idea to the production team, which included Production Manager Jeff Larson, set designer Sara Walsh, costume designer Julia Perdue, Stage Manager Maddie Cavallino ’21, and lighting designer Duncan Davies ’21. to come up with a game plan.
Their collaborative vision was to create an online, multimedia project comprising all the parts of the play and aspects of its story that the audience does notnormally see: love letters or voicemails between characters, snippets of characters’ habits on video, and video sequences of different moments within the play.
“What was important to all of us was that this is not
The Seagull
,” Willcoxon wrote. “ It is something else that connects to and is inspired by the
Seagull
, the work we have done on the
The Seagull
, and this present moment in which we find ourselves; in particular, for us, the loss of our production.”
Remote work on “The Seagull You Never Saw” began quickly after spring break ended. Since the beginning of this project, we have worked independently and collaboratively, responding to different assignments and prompts in order to generate content that could be added to the final online presentation.
The initial prompt asked us to reflect on the ways our current lives were paralleled in the play.
Responding to that prompt, Ashley Huntington ’20 wrote to me that “We found ourselves living out the “plot” and “setting’’ that Chekhov originally established: alone, isolated, stuck, in mourning of something, or someone.” These parallels have aided her in generating content. “I’ve tried to channel that balance of what I’m going through now in a pandemic and what my character, Masha, goes through in the play when I create material.”
Of her friends from home who also do theatre, Luddy wrote, “I’m one of the only ones… that got to continue working on the show in some new way.” She continued, “Creating material for this project… makes me feel so connected to others and it’s allowed me to rethink the ways that theatre and art can heal.”
Work has been challenging at times, especially when many of us cannot leave our apartment at all and thus cannot go far to record things. It can also be difficult to manage technical difficulties when collaborating on a project. And of course, it has been difficult preparing for a project that is not the final product everyone had been hoping for when they signed onto
The Seagull
.
Despite these difficulties, the process has been eye-opening and even fun.
“One of my favorite projects I worked on was a short video of my character Masha exploring her extremes,” Huntington wrote. “I got to ruin my makeup, sob and scream for those parts. It was a great release of quarantine energy!”
The project has been particularly collaborative because it has required both the cast and the crew to make creative material. Normally, Willcoxon writes, “You see the actors on stage but don’t realize how many people must work to realize the entire world of the play. In this project, we had everyone working together to create the content of this piece.”
As of what we can expect of the final project, things are currently tentative. According to Willcoxon, “Right now we are working on developing what that format will be… It is not a walk through the play but an experience of various moments and sequences that students have developed in relationship to the play and its world. We also want the site to be interactive — the viewer chooses the various sites to go to within the website.”
The date that “The Seagull You Never Saw” website goes live is also tentative and there are currently three target release dates. As the production team develops and designs the website, we seek to debut ideally before the end of the semester. Students and staff can expect an announcement via email of how to access and view the project.
