Stanislavski, who directed the first serious production of The Seagull, thought the play was a tragedy, and later directors have tended to adopt this interpretation even though Chekhov himself called it a comedy. By now, in fact, the "gloom" of Chekhov has become such a joke that any less than perfect production of his plays can easily make them seem farcical.

It is a measure of the excellence of Jonathan Black's Seagull that it never does seem ridiculous. This is not to damn with faint praise. The opening night audience was knowledgeable and nervous. It knew what was potentially amusing and tittered at the slightest awkwardness. Everyone seemed to be dying to laugh out-right. But Black and his cast practically never let them.

They set just the right langorous pace at the very beginning. Yet because the actors never seem embarassed by the long pauses which Chekhov actually wrote into the script, but instead used them to fill out their characterizations, the play never drags. And despite some serious lapses in acting, the cast as a whole maintains an almost flawless bittersweet tone throughout the play.

As the program notes suggest, Black wanted an objective, balanced performance, in which every character would seem at once amusing and bitterly pathetic. In two regards the Loeb production falls short of Black's aims.

The comic scenes are played a bit too slickly, too much on the surface of the characters. Harvard audiences tend to watch the performance more than the person, and the actors are all too conscious of this. They get isolated laughs with the delivery of individual lines, instead of letting their humorousness emerge slowly. In a comedy of characters, rather than one of wit, this can be fatal. Darryl Palmer's Medvedenko, for example, never becomes more than a caricatured schoolteacher: we never feel his pain.

In the serious scenes almost all the actors seem slightly unnatural. Chekhov should be played as plainly as possible. Because of the suggestiveness of the dialogue, it is most effective when spoken in an ordinary unaffected manner. Unfortunately, the actors try so hard to wring emotion out of crucial scenes that they kill many of their lines.

Virginia Morris, as Arcadina, is a prime example. In the mass scenes she is magnificent. She radiates her egotism, her impatience, with every gesture. But in flattering her lover, Trigorin, into returning to the city with her, she is curiously false and ineffective. It was there I expected to find out just how strong Arcadina was. At the Loeb she seems weak--yet Trigorin gives in.

Similarly, Anthony Dawson as Constantine hints at his relationship with his mother quite skillfully in his alternately sarcastic and nervous monologue on her in the first act. But when he declares his love for Nina in the last act, he uses such a whiney tone as to be thoroughly unworthy of sympathy.

Laura Esterman, as Nina, turns in the best performance in the crisis scenes. But though she does not over-dramatize, she sometimes speaks with too polished a voice for such an ingenuous character.

Nor does John Williams, as Trigorin, deteriorate in his key scenes. But he doesn't use them to reveal much of his character. Williams maintains a gently amused tone, never suggesting the almost accidentally ruthless element in Trigorin.

Peter Weil as Sorin, and John Ross as Dorn created distinct characters; Johanna Madden, as Masha, created a superb one. All three maintained the tone and pace of the production perfectly, in their individual scenes.

In many Harvard plays, the actors do well enough themselves, but behave almost without reference to each other. In this production all the relationships are clear. Everyone acts, even when he has no lines. The timing is perfect. The lapses are only as obvious as they are because the general level of performance is so high.