The Notebook of Trigorin is the realization of Tennessee Williams’ lifelong dream to interpret The Sea Gull, which he called “the first and greatest modern play.” Williams was twenty-four and still “Tom” when he discovered Chekhov. He had just had a nervous breakdown, brought on by typing orders eight hours a day in a shoe factory and writing all night. Recovering at his grandparents’ in Memphis in the summer of 1935, he first read Chekhov in the library of nearby Rhodes College. Instantly attracted to the stories, he went on to read the letters and plays and felt in Chekhov’s life an affinity with his own. He saw his household as if it were a Chekhov drama: a group of unhappy people bound to each other by circumstance and blood, living out their daily routine in frustration. Chekhov’s portraits of an aristocratic culture giving way to a bourgeois society seemed akin to his own family’s experience: the genteel mother and grandparents, forced from a rural idyllic South to the confines of industrial St. Louis.
When Tom entered Washington University that fall, he studied playwriting. He kept a framed picture of the Russian playwright above his typewriter and for his assignment in a literature class wrote an enthusiastic essay: “Birth of an Art (Anton Chekhov and The New Theatre).” His strict Germanic professor marked on it, “No page numbers! . . . This in no way fulfills the requirement of a term paper. . . .” Williams, like Chekhov’s Constantine, would always ignore the rules. Actually, his twenty-two page paper was discerning, reviewing the social background of Chekhov’s work, tracing his history as a playwright and commenting on his theatrical innovations. He compared Chekhov to Ibsen, Shaw, and O’Neill, pointing out that whereas lyricism permeated a Chekhov play, when O’Neill’s characters become lyrical “one suspects them of having had a few drinks. . . .” He noted that The Sea Gull is “a tragedy of inaction” and that although perhaps fifty per cent of the speeches would seem to have no direct bearing on the story, actually “every line belongs in its place.”
Williams especially identified with Constantine, the young playwright in The Sea Gull. Tom’s early journals record the same self-doubt and romantic anguish which Constantine suffers; like him, the young Williams was shy, sensitive, passionate, often in despair, even contemplating suicide. Each had an ambivalent relationship with a domineering mother. In the back of a college textbook he had scrawled a line from Strindberg: “It is called love-hatred and it hails from the pit.” Constantine’s passionate cry for new forms in the theatre sounds very much like Williams’ plea for “a plastic theatre” which would involve music, dance, and the visual arts. In a youthful journal [1943] he wrote that realistic drama was dead. The play of the future would be a series of short cumulative scenes. Actors would perform on one simple set where a pillar could represent a building, a chandelier a drawing room; exterior could be transformed to interior by lighting. “The straight realistic play with its genuine frigidaire and its authentic ice-cubes, its characters that speak exactly as its audience speaks” must give way to a drama of psychological action.
Williams’ staging innovations, realized in The Glass Menagerie a year later, were to change American theatre. The first reviews of that play noted its “Chekhovian” mood, a description that would be repeated by critics from Summer and Smoke to Night of the Iguana. Williams had already established the link in a 1941 one-act, The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, where his Writer, asked his name, cries out “Chekhov! Anton Pavlovich Chekhov!” Most of his one-act plays resemble Chekhov stories, brief inconclusive glimpses into a character’s life at some telling moment. He had Chekhov’s same feeling for human isolation and the impossibility of people understanding each other. Like Chekhov, Williams was as much poet as playwright. He was especially drawn to The Sea Gull, which he called “my favorite of all plays.” Its characters, two playwrights and two actresses, attracted him immediately, and its theme of the artist’s struggles against society’s indifference fit his own experience at the time. By eerie coincidence, Tennessee’s first professional production, the 1940 Battle of Angels, ended in a debacle of smoke and fumes, driving out the audience, exactly as did the sulfurous fumes in Constantine’s dream play. In Battle, Val’s poetic monologue about the legless bird which can never come to earth is reminiscent of The Sea Gull in both subject and style. Arkadina derides Nina’s long opening speech as a “recitative.” Almost every Williams drama has such monologues—lyrical “arias.” One might speculate that The Sea Gull influenced A Streetcar Named Desire; in both, people’s lives are being destroyed during a game of cards. Stanley’s final line, “This game is seven card stud,” echoes Trigorin’s triumphal “The game is mine!”
Even after Streetcar in 1947 established Williams as a leading American playwright, he thought of Chekhov and The Sea Gull. Three years later, learning that his friend Paul Bigelow might produce the play he begged to collaborate on the staging. “It would be a thrilling experience to help bring a play like that into its difficult, very delicate sort of reality,” he wrote. The project fell through, but in 1953 he wrote critic Brooks Atkinson that his dream now was to direct The Sea Gull. He would cast Brando as Constantine, Stella Adler as Mme. Arkadina, Geraldine Page as Nina. Through the years when interviewers asked which three writers had influenced him the most, he answered “Chekhov! Chekhov! Chekhov!”
In the seventies, writing his Memoirs, he was reminded of his ambition to reinterpret Chekhov’s play. While he still loved the poetry of the writing, he now felt that it held too much in reserve, that it had never been let out of the confines of the translation “straitjacket.” At different periods he had empathized with various characters in The Sea Gull; in his youth with Constantine, the idealistic experimentor; in middle age with Dr. Dorn, the detached bystander who observes the other characters and has them face their reality. Now he saw himself in Trigorin, the world-weary writer. Williams, too, had made compromises with the demands of success.
It was only near the end of his life and outside his own country that his dream of interpreting The Sea Gull was realized. In 1980 he was invited to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to conduct writing seminars. The added incentive was that The Red Devil Battery Sign, a late play he was revising, would be produced by the Vancouver Playhouse. In the last decade Williams’ work had been better received abroad than in the United States. Here his audience expected more big dramas like Streetcar or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, whereas he now wanted to experiment with new forms. Working with the Playhouse director, Roger Hodgman, he mentioned his lifelong ambition to adapt The Sea Gull and was commissioned to prepare his own version to be the season’s opener in September 1981. Through the summer he wrote Hodgman enthusiastic reports. He thought that much in the play was so understated that it was not understood by today’s public. His intent was to make what was whispered in Chekhov, speak out boldly. He would try to give a more contemporary treatment, more theatrical excitement. Whether he succeeded or failed, his effort must be seen as an act of love. He informed Hodgman that he was working from two translations, Ann Dunnigan’s, which he called “the best,” and Stark Young’s, citing Constance Garnett’s early standard translation as stilted and “downright illiterate.” It is a surprise to find Williams, so often derided by critics as non-intellectual, engaged in the scholarly work of comparing translations. To see the master playwright of one generation humbly pondering the working methods of the earlier master is somehow touching and provides a glimpse of how each one created. Looking back on fifty years of playwriting, he could trace his own progression from idealistic to practical; in that lifetime he had learned that even the most significant ideas must be translated into the popular language of the theatre.
Williams approached his project with some trepidation. His Russian friend Maria St. Just was so outraged that he would take liberties with the sacred play that she hid his book. He knew others would share her feeling that to make any textual changes would be taking license. But he had always taken risks. He already had in mind a different ending—instead of Chekhov’s narrated last line, action that would involve visual magic. He called his version The Notebook of Trigorin, taking the title from “The Notebook of Anton Chekhov” which he had read so long ago. However, by mid-June he had sent Hodgman only bits and pieces of writing. Now, less than two years before his death, Williams’ energy was depleted. He had had no critical success since Night of the Iguana, in 1961; his final play to be shown on Broadway, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, 1980, was a failure. Between his deteriorating health, his constant travels, demands from the Goodman Theatre in Chicago for their spring, 1981, production of his last long play, A House Not Meant to Stand, and from New York where Something Cloudy, Something Clear would be performed that August, his new script had not materialized. The Vancouver rehearsals for The Notebook of Trigorin began that same month with no Williams and no adaptation. They had to start with Chekhov’s original, using a set which bore little relation to either playwright’s concept. When the wayward author did show up, his script changes alarmed the cast. He had brought Chekhov’s buried conflicts to the surface; his submerged melodrama was acted out in an ending where Arkadina must finally face her part in her son’s tragedy. The play ran from September 12 to October 10, but there was resentment about the playwright’s early defection. After he left, Chekhov’s ending was restored.
Williams rewrote his ending after the Canadian production, and continued to revise the play until he died in 1983. The script was lying among other unpublished manuscripts on an agent’s desk when an English director, Stephen Hollis, saw it and commenced his fourteen-year effort to have it produced. Maria St. Just, as a trustee of Williams’ estate—and perhaps over-zealous to protect his reputation—had denied permission for any production until she could re-evaluate the work under appropriate circumstances. She arranged a successful reading at Lincoln Center on December 14, 1992, with a cast including Marsha Mason, George Grizzard, and Kate Burton, but no production materialized. It was only after her death that Hollis and the Cincinnati Playhouse secured permission for a full-scale stage production. This event in October 1996 celebrated the 100th anniversary of The Sea Gull’s first performance in 1896 as well as the premiere of the play as Tennessee Williams envisioned it.
What sort of play did the Cincinnati audience see? In general, what Chekhov narrates, Williams demonstrates. He puts onstage what in Chekhov happens offstage. Williams brings more visible craft to the play, and by using the very dramatic devices Chekhov avoided—plot, conflict, action, climax, denouement—makes it more theatrical. Technically, he pays more attention to staging, modernizes period references, adds walk-on or exit lines where needed. At the opening of The Sea Gull, the makeshift stage for Constantine’s performance is merely noted in the directions and mentioned casually by Masha; Williams shows the business of stagehands erecting it, in effect saying, this is a play about theatre. He makes the play more vigorous by summarizing Chekhov’s long philosophical musings, breaking the characters’ lines into shorter speeches. While Chekhov’s humor is so subtle in translation as to be lost on a modern audience, Williams injects more obvious comedy. What are implications in Chekhov’s character portraits, Williams amplifies. Chekhov shows Trigorin dominated by Arkadina with no explanation. Williams invents a scene to explain it. While in Chekhov actions seem to happen incidentally, Williams predicts and prepares, giving clues, building suspense. Where Chekhov’s characters behave and talk as in real life, undirected, uttering irrelevancies, Williams manipulates them to advance the plot. Chekhov paints his people in an impressionistic way, whereas Williams is expressionistic, emphasizing their motives and emotions. His probing extends even to the minor characters. His treatment of Masha and Medvedenko illustrate his technique. Their opening dialogue in The Sea Gull on the surface tends to make them seem one-dimensional, her a depressive, him a bore. He loves her; she despises him. She serves mainly to furnish the exposition and perform necessary actions. (She makes a bed, draws the curtains, summons Kostya, keeps the card game going.) She is consistently taciturn and bitter. Williams shows that Masha is more complicated. He focuses on Medvedenko’s famous line “Why do you always wear black?” to build a scene between them which enacts her revulsion and his sexual frustration, creating some sympathy for the schoolmaster. He cuts Masha’s long speeches into one-line quips, making her more sardonic than sour and creates a scene between Masha and her mother, to express her hopeless love for Kostya and Polina’s equally hopeless love for Dorn.
Williams’ Dr. Dorn is also an interesting transformation. Chekhov’s Dorn is the logical observer, the realist who comments on the behavior of those around him but feels that it will not change. He perhaps represents the clinical Chekhov who was himself a doctor. He also resembles the detached observer side of Tennessee Williams. (Williams had originally hoped to play the Doctor in the Vancouver production.) Williams changes him from bystander to participant, seizing on Chekhov’s clues. Dorn mentions his success with women-patients; Williams makes him a womanizer, adding comedy to the play as he flirts with each female in turn. Noticing the streak of cruelty in Dorn’s indifference, he builds on it. This adds more dramatic contrast, especially in a contrapuntal scene with Arkadina where his sly cynicism further exposes her egotism. If this Dorn seems a departure from Chekhov, it was one of the most effective in the Cincinnati production—an adaptation that obviously “worked.”
But Williams’ most radical change in the script is his treatment of Trigorin, the writer. Chekhov brings him onstage with notebook in hand, but Williams goes further to make the notebook the play’s dominant symbol rather than the sea gull. Whereas Chekhov’s Trigorin appears to be genuinely attracted to Nina (though he callously discards her in the end), Williams uncovers his true motivation: “It could be the most important romance I’ve ever written,” he has Trigorin cry. This becomes a crucial line in the play, exposing that, for the writer the most sacred emotional experience becomes a paragraph in the ever-present notebook. Williams makes Trigorin the lead character, bringing him center stage, doubling his speeches, having him propel the action, as his relationship with his mistress Arkadina becomes a duel, erupting in the quarrel which is the melodramatic climax of the play. Chekhov presents Trigorin’s slavish domination by Arkadina without explanation. He simply admits that he is “soft,” “submissive.” Williams uses this supposition of traditional “feminine” qualities to make him a bisexual. In a revealing departure from Chekhov’s text in Act Two, Williams personalizes Trigorin’s long soliloquy on the writer’s life to express his own convictions: the writer must recognize both his feminine and masculine sides. This is Williams unmasked, taking his stand against homophobia. For Williams, who sat down at his typewriter every day of his life, Trigorin’s obession with writing, his self-doubts as to its value, his confession that he uses others as material, are his own laments. It is the seventy-year-old playwright who adds: “You live from one work to the next, haunted always by—am I finished? Will there be another?”
Making Trigorin, rather than Constantine, protagonist in the play also moves the spotlight from Nina to Arkadina. Chekhov’s Arkadina is chiefly a portrait-of-the-actress, on the surface charming, temperamental, amusing in her egoism. Williams’ treatment is an extreme, but logical extension. He pictures her as older, with her career on the wane. Underneath the comedy we feel her desperation. He demonstrates how her self-absorption destroys her son as it has Trigorin. She becomes one of Williams’ great “monster woman” characters—a role which in Cincinnati Lynn Redgrave played to the hilt. Arkadina, clutching at past glories, recalls the Princess in Sweet Bird of Youth; each has a key speech in defense of theatre. Since Williams so often used his own family as subjects, it is tempting to see in Arkadina a portrait of his mother, who had the same attention to dress, had aspired to be an actress, and who made her quarrels with her husband into dramatic scenes. Arkadina’s stinginess, her belittling of her son’s writing, might remind him of his father’s meanness and how it had affected his youth.
Perhaps Nina, beautiful and doomed, recalled his sister Rose as well. If so, he took the writer’s privilege of correcting real life—Chekhov’s portrayal of real life—by making Nina stronger. He deletes her incipient “mad scene”—“I am a sea gull. . . ,” and adds vigor by substituting short speeches for lengthy monologues. When she returns for a last meeting with Constantine, she summarizes their lives in Williams’ words: “Well, so it’s gone—our youth.” He makes her less effusively romantic and deletes her lofty soliloquy about “having faith” and “bearing one’s cross” to focus on having “the strength to endure,” his own credo. Building on Chekhov’s mention of “a letter from America,” he lets Nina’s baby live to be adopted in the United States, thus creating a link between the old world and the new—and by implication linking the Russian playwright and the American. Williams is true to Chekhov’s symbolism in Nina, her connection with the lake, her virginal white. He sees her as a transcendent figure, like his own Hannah in Night of the Iguana who understands the road she must take. It may be more than coincidence that both the names “Nina” and “Hannah” mean “grace.”
Finally, the play under Williams’ touch becomes more oedipal, uncovering what Chekhov kept underneath. In his college essay on The Sea Gull, Tom had noticed the oedipal hint. In writing his adaption, Williams restudied it. Chekhov called his Sea Gull a comedy but deliberately built it on a framework of Hamlet, the prototypical tragedy. He used the same basic situation of love, hate and jealousy; the same triangle of son, mother, lover; the self-analyzing youth and the discarded young girl, who like Ophelia is associated with flowers and water images. As in Shakespeare’s tragedy, there is a play-within-the-play, and the closet scene between Hamlet and Gertrude is imitated when Arkadina binds up Constantine’s wounds. Chekhov suggests the connection early in the play by having mother and son greet each other with quotations from Hamlet. Williams’ technique is to prepare for this opening by having Masha first mention both Hamlet and Ophelia. If Chekhov used the Hamlet references subliminally to create a tension which his delicate play eschews, Williams builds on that tension with stylistic changes which are certainly more Shakespeare than Chekhov. One could say that in The Notebook of Trigorin, three playwrights are at work. Chekhov, having led his audience to expect the noble demise of Shakespeare’s hero, ends with irony: one flat line, “Kostya has shot himself.” Shakespeare might have preferred Williams’ coup de théâtre. Even as her son’s body is being borne onstage, Arkadina turns to the audience and gives her final bow—a demonstration that, for a professional, the show must go on.
The Cincinnati Playhouse production was widely and favorably reviewed, with universal agreement on the acting as excellent. A significant factor in its success was the exceptionally beautiful setting by Ming Cho Lee, one of America’s foremost designers, who had done previous sets for Williams plays. This was inspired by a black-and-white photograph he had taken of the grounds of Olana, the estate of the nineteenth-century painter Frederick Church in the Hudson River Valley. A subtle, moody scene of water, trees and sky, it reminded him of The Sea Gull. For Trigorin, the photograph was transferred to canvas, enlarged to fill the entire backdrop and side walls and even extended onto the stage, so that the reflection of the lake stretched across the floor. This suggested the Russian interpretation of the lake as having magic powers and underscored Chekhov’s “when the lake is disturbed, it seems to affect us all.” Magical was the evocative lighting by Brian Nason, with its range of color effects, from twilight to thunderstorm. Aside from wicker garden chairs, a table or two, merely the suggestion of doors, the mural was the setting, reinforcing the lyrical quality of the writing and becoming almost a character in the play. Thus the set answered Constantine’s plea for “something new”—as well as Williams’ manifesto against stage realism.
His hope, to “try to make the script, as I interpret it, so beautiful that it will disarm [critics]” was on the whole successful. “Fascinating,” “compelling,” “a winner,” “humorous,” “relevant,” “poetic,” “an exciting new look at a classic,” were some of the comments; Chekhov’s and Williams’ “ironic wit and abiding compassion for humanity blend well. . . .” One person did observe that the characters seem driven to their ruin, not trapped as in Chekhov. Of twenty reviews only three were negative. Construing Trigorin as a bisexual drew the most controversy: one critic wrote that it would make Chekhov spin in his grave, while another found it “a totally valid interpretation of the role.” All agreed that Lynn Redgrave as the aging actress gave a bravura performance, “rich in emotional colors” but there were contrasting opinions on her final action. Where one declared that “it falls flat,” another called it “as powerful a moment as one is likely to find in the theatre.”
In 1981 when Williams commenced his “free adaption” of The Sea Gull he wrote: “I hope this is understood as . . . a profession of deep love for Chekhov. . . . I will probably take more licenses. . . .” Williams does succeed in making the characters and actions of the play more accessible to a contemporary American audience. But in “taking license,” he made the play more Williams than Chekhov. Ultimately the best way to approach this drama is as a newly discovered Tennessee Williams work. The Notebook of Trigorin gains power when seen as the personal notebook of Tennessee Williams, valuable for what it tells us about the methods and motivations of America’s premier playwright. Perhaps, as critic Felicia Londré suggests, Williams has here invented a new form: part adaptation, part interpretation, the fusion of a classic drama by one master with a contemporary original by another. The “magic” he created is that in The Notebook of Trigorin, the voices of two great playwrights a century apart are joined in one work of art.
—Allean Hale
The Notebook of Trigorin was given its United States premiere on September 5, 1996, by the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Cincinnati, Ohio. Its performance commemorated the 100th anniversary of The Sea Gull’s opening in 1896 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Trigorin was directed by Stephen Hollis; set design was by Ming Cho Lee; costume design by Candice Donnelly; lighting by Brian Nason, and sound by David B. Smith. Production stage manager was Bruce E. Coyle, and stage manager, Suann Pollock. Edward Stern was producing artistic director. The cast, in order of appearance, was as follows:
| Semyon Semyonovich MEDVEDENKO, a teacher | JACK CIRILLO |
| MASHA, Shamrayev’s daughter | NATACHA ROI |
| CONSTANTINE Gavrilovich Treplev, Arkadina’s son | TIMOTHY ALTMEYER |
| YAKOV, a workman | JED DAVIS |
| Pytor Nikolayevich SORIN, Arkadina’s brother | DONALD CHRISTOPHER |
| Boris Alekseyevich TRIGORIN, a writer | JEFF WOODMAN |
| NINA Mikhailovna Zarechnaya, daughter of a wealthy landowner | STINA NIELSEN |
| POLINA Andreyevna, Shamrayev’s wife | SONJA LANZENER |
| Yevgeny DORN, a doctor | PHILIP PLEASANTS |
| Ilya Afanasyevich SHAMRAYEV, Sorin’s estate manager | ALAN MIXON |
| Irina Nikolayevna ARKADINA, an actress | LYNN REDGRAVE |
| Cook | JOHN SHARP |
| Old Woman | ELEANOR B. SHEPHERD POPPI KRAMER |
| Maid | POPPI KRAMER |
| Workers | JACK MARSHALL BRUCE PILKENTON |