Tennessee Williams freely adapts Anton Chekhov's Russian classic "The Seagull".
From the master twentieth-century playwright Tennessee Williams-an adaptation of Chekhov's
The Sea Gull
, never before available to the general trade.
The Notebook of Trigorin
is faithful to Chekhov's story of longing and unrequited love. Set on a provincial Russian Estate, its peaceful environs offer stark contrast to the turbulent lives of its characters. Constantine, a young writer, must compete for the attention of his mother, a self-obsessed, often comical aging actress, Madame Arkadina, and his romantic ideal, Nina. His rival for both women is Trigorin, an established author bound to Arkadina by her patronage of his work, and attracted to Nina by her beauty. Trigorin cannot keep himself from consuming everything of value in Constantine's life. Only in the final scenes do all discover that the price for love and fragility can be horribly high. But if the words in
are essentially Chekhov's, the voice belongs firmly to Tennessee Williams. The dialogue resonates with echoes of the themes Williams developed as his signatures-compassion for the artistic soul and its vulnerability in the face of the world's "successfully practiced duplicity" (Act I).