Dramaturgical Dip: The Seagull

Anton Chekhov was born in 1860. The four mature plays on which Anton Chekhov’s fame as a playwright rests are: The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1903). Chekhov died in 1904. These final two decades of Chekhov’s life and art during which he wrote his principal works were ones of extreme governmental oppression in Russia.

In 1861, Czar Alexander II freed the serfs, an act comparable to our own Emancipation Proclamation in 1865, ushering in a brief period of freedom of expression, even as the Russian Empire continued its expansion into the Caucasus, Turkistan, and East Asia. In 1866, there was an attempt on Czar Alexander II’s life, and he became increasingly conservative with the state becoming more oppressive. This led in the 1870s to a movement of young intellectuals who went out into the countryside to “infiltrate among the people,” share their lives, educate them, and attempt to activate discontent along revolutionary lines. Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 spawned a period of reaction under Alexander III and Nicholas II, the last Russian Czar, during which they both tried to root out terrorism in their midst.

Meanwhile, the Emancipation of the Serfs meant the land-owning class went into rapid decline as new industrialists rose to power, and both peasants and former serfs flocked to the cities for work in the factories. Dangerous working conditions and appalling living conditions fomented labor unrest that a government - still operating as if over a semi-feudal economy - was ill-equipped to handle, and in which the Russian aristocracy tried to maintain its position in a world where it was increasingly irrelevant. This is the background of Chekhov’s major works: a world of changing values of great social and spiritual stress.

The Seagull |Jan 8–17, 2026

A famous actress named Arkadina presides over a multi-generational family of artists in the Russian countryside. Arkadina’s son Konstantin, a writer, loves the young actress Nina, who is transfixed by the fame of Arkadina’s lover Trigorin, also a writer. All four go their separate ways, but two years later they are reunited at the same estate, reviving their romantic and artistic conflicts. Through their desperate love, dreams of success and dread of failure we learn that what each of them idolizes is the very thing they lack. Heralded as one of Chekhov's greatest works, The Seagull plays comedy and drama on a knife-edge.