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Chekhov
Characters are chosen by playwrights to dramatize the concerns about humanity that motivate the play they are in. To create character, you must get to why and how the character is in the play.
Learn to get your cues for characterization from the play.
What�s the play about?
At its deeper levels, Sea Gull dramatizes the battle of the generations: the established, successful adult world against the world of hopeful, striving young people. Arkadina and Trigorin on one side against Treplev and Nina on the other.
What does the play say about this battle? What does the sea gull embody beyond a metaphor for Nina?
The rest of the characters line up on either side of the battle line. Sorin is a Treplev who didn�t die. He is now on the adult side. (Note the source of Chekhov�s comedy: Sorin says all he ever wanted was to be a writer and a husband. �I never did either�. And we laugh! Why?)
Masha and Medvedenko are young people who have already given over. Medvedenko has been locked in his teacher�s chains and will never free himself. Masha�s youth (hopeful of what? Striving for what?) has long been crushed as well. By what?
Plays are crafted of opposites. The two youngest women in the play are Nina and Masha. Nina is dressed in white, comes soaring in like a sea gull. She is full of life and hope and promise. Masha is dressed in black. Her first line: �I am in mourning for my life. I�m unhappy.� Have you known someone in mourning? In grief that has lasted years? (It was more than a year after my sister�s death before my mother barely laughed for the first time again.) Masha could just as easily say: �I am one of the walking dead, I am clinically depressed.� (Imagine the beginning of the play. It�s dark. The sound of nails being pounded into wood. An offstage cough. From the opposite direction, a dark figure whose pale white face and pale hands move in the dusk.)
The other metaphor Chekhov gives is �I feel as if I�m a thousand years old, dragging an endless train behind me�. That�s the train of a dress. Get your actor�s imagination exploring, creating with these cues. Dress in black (when did she first put on black? Why? Why has she continued to put on the black dress day after day?) Pull your hair back. She is not attractive. She has eliminated any joy in life. Put a glass in your hand and walk (Where? Has she any goal she wants to get to? Compare with Nina. Walk without �life�, without joy in resistance to gravity.), dragging an endless train behind her.
Eliminate all engaged or delighting movement and easy, effortless gesture from her behavior. Take away any real lilt from her voice, pare away dismissive, slight ironies and implications. Masha lives deep deep down in a heart and a soul in pain. She drinks to dull the pain. It doesn�t work. So she drinks more. But she can�t escape. Because she faces reality directly. Whatever sense of humor she might once have had (and if you look at the life she must have had�imagine living with Shamraev as your father�she never had much joy) now feeds a trenchant sense of irony. Look life directly in the face, right out over the audience: �I�ll tear love out by the roots. I�ll get married.� She has a mordant sense of irony. It will touch off laughter in the audience, just as Sorin�s statement in Act One does. But right behind the laughter is a terrible realization that points to the depths of the plays theme.
�My foot�s asleep�. The woman is dying before our very eyes and no one sees. Arkadina uses her (�Which one of us looks younger, doctor?�) because she can�t get at Nina. In Act One, Dorn takes the snuff away from her. Why doesn�t someone go after her in Act Two and confront her about her drinking? By Act Three she is drinking openly. Note the �journey� of the character through the play. It is heartbreaking.
Why does Medvedenko love her?
Why doesn�t Paulina sit her down and have a woman-to-woman talk with her?
Why does Treplev not want her following him?
Why is it Masha who calls out the numbers of the lotto game?
Learn to let the play help you create your character within the larger framework of the drama.
And I mean drama in terms of theatre. (Now you write the rest of the essay that follows that sentence.