Review: "The Notebook of Trigorin" Both Considers and Extends the Irondale Legacy

The Notebook of Trigorin

Written by Tennessee Williams

Directed by Jim Niesen

Presented by Irondale Ensemble Project at The Space at Irondale

85 South Oxford Street, Brooklyn. NYC

March 28-April 27, 2025

The Notebook of Trigorin. Photo courtesy of The PR Social

As a twentieth-century American adaptation of a late nineteenth-century Russian play, Tennessee Williams's The Notebook of Trigorin already bridges places and times at significant removes from one another, and Irondale's new production enthralls while adding a few new lanes to that bridge. Williams's "free adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Sea Gull," as the play identifies itself, represented the achievement near the end of his life of, to borrow Allean Hale's phrasing, a "lifelong dream to interpret" this particular work by the Russian writer, of whom Williams had been an ardent fan since his early twenties. Hale's introduction to the 1997 New Directions edition of The Notebook of Trigorin offers a concise and useful overview of the changes that Williams made in emphasis, rhythm, humor, and character, including tweaking Chekhov's ending and presenting the Trigorin of the adaptation's title as an explicitly bisexual man. Irondale's revival further layers the adaptation by presenting it as an impromptu reading by a cross-generational group of Irondale actors, some of whom were, non-fictionally, members of Irondale during its first production of The Sea Gull in 1997 - making this Notebook of Trigorin a free reframing, perhaps.

The Notebook of Trigorin provides some lightly immersive touches even before the start of the show proper, further blurring the lines between the fictionalized and actual Irondale casts, and seating for a portion of the audience is available at tables on the periphery of performance area, further eroding distinctions between the inside and outside of the play world. As we transition seamlessly into the opening of the show, the cast are reminiscing about doing Uncle Vanya on East 4th Street, which leads to the two youngest actors, Jacqueline Joncas and Raphael Simon, revealing that they will be playing Nina and Constantine, respectively, in a soon-to-open production of The Notebook of Trigorin but are struggling with some aspects. During this conversation, questions arise of why the older cast members staged The Sea Gull in 1997, how the layers of worlds in the Williams adaptation work together, and the relative accessibility of Williams's and Chekhov's language, and the end result is that everyone starts in on a read-through of The Notebook of Trigorin. At first played very much as actors reading from scripts, the production bursts into bustling, noisy life as Simon performs Constantine's first lines, a sort of encapsulation of the way that production faultlessly blends a deconstructive visibility of stagecraft–including in Ken Rothchild's set design and the live musical accompaniment by Sam Day Harmet–and fourth-wall-breaking asides and metacommentary with engrossing naturalism in the performances both of the actors as the actors and the actors (sometimes holding scripts, sometimes not) as the characters in The Notebook of Trigorin.

The Notebook of Trigorin. Photo courtesy of The PR Social

While class plays a large role in The Notebook of Trigorin–schoolteacher Medvedenko (Gerry Goodstein) bemoans his poor salary before we are ten sentences into the play–at its heart (also) lie questions of literature and theater. Medvedenko's opening exchange with the estate manager's daughter, Masha (Vicky Gilmore), establishes that Constantine is soon to put on his original play, a poetic postapocalyptic monologue delivered by earnest, naïve local girl Nina, at his mother's lakefront estate. Constantine, or Kostya, lives at the estate year-round, working, so far without payoff, to become a writer who advances "new forms," while his mother, Arkadina (Barbara MacKenzie-Wood), or Irina, a successful but aging stage actress, often departs for extended periods for her theatrical engagements. Irina is also currently involved in a romantic engagement with the novelist and her traveling companion Trigorin (Stephen Cross), successful in his profession as well and here given an accent that underscores the potential for identifying Trigorin with Williams himself. Also living at the estate is Irina's brother, Sorin (Terry Greiss), attended by Dorn (Michael-David Gordon), a doctor whose benefit to Sorin is questionable but whose womanizing tendencies Williams's adaptation makes unavoidably clear. Kostya, who lacks financial and, when it comes to his writing, emotional support from Irina, disapproves of the bourgeois writer Trigorin, and the friction between them only increases when Trigorin sets his eye on Nina, herself a fan of Trigorin who welcomes this development but on whom Kostya has already fixed his unreturned affections. Love, the unrequited, the exploited, the (less often) genuine, even the artistic, links most of the characters in the play along multivalent lines and has significant impacts for several of them.

Among and intersecting with matters of love, questions of art–and theater especially–occupy the foreground, alongside considerations of age, and the generational gap between Nina and Kostya and the rest of the cast highlights the play's threads about the relationship of old and new forms of art and about aging, the denials it spurs, and the fears and frustrations of looking back over the accomplishments, or lack thereof, that populate one's life. The production also ensures that audiences don't miss the additional foregrounding of Irina and Nina–and the intersections of art and life–through Williams's having Trigorin speak of the women as his "notebooks." MacKenzie-Wood is a frequently hilarious Irina while also displaying genuine tenderness in at least one scene with Simon's Kostya and a potent mix of anger and affection during a fight with Cross's also frequently funny but nuanced Trigorin. Goodstein and Gilmore–who shines throughout as the unhappy, iconoclastic Masha, at one point playing both Masha and her mother for an extended exchange–deliver a similarly charged scene between Medvedenko and Masha in the play's latter stages. Greiss, who also doubles roles as Masha's father, renders Sorin and his fixation on the (art of the) past both humorous and sympathetic, and Gordon gives Dorn an appropriately shady charisma. As the representatives of the new generation, Simon and Joncas impressively incarnate Kostya's and Nina's respective descents into disillusionment. Significantly before those descents end up in rather contrasting places, an excellently staged moment when Kostya walks up and drops a murdered sea gull right between the feet of Trigorin and Nina as they are about to kiss acts as a memorable symbol of the intimacy and unpredictability that characterize this rousing, multidimensional production.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards