The Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble’s A Seagull, an adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, never really picks up in earnest after intermission. Instead, the third act opens backstage. We watch two live-streaming videos of the cast projected against the theater’s curtainless concrete walls—pipes, electrical boxes, and all. They’re rehearsing lines, but also talking about Target, fiancés. Despite the first two acts’ steady current of lines like, “The play will start soon,” and, “This isn’t part of the play,” this transition flattens anything that was left of a fourth wall. The audience is inside the rest of the play.

The production marks the end of a 10-year project. Since 2014, PETE has been adapting Chekhov’s four major plays with Lewis & Clark professor Štĕpán Šimek. Šimek is responsible for translating the text, but, instead of fidelity to the Russian, PETE has grown more and more interested in producing something that resonates with its twenty-first-century audience. As its name suggests, PETE is a theater company devoted to rethinking how a play is assembled. With its play-within-a-play structure and ruminations on art’s place in society, The Seagull (1896) is a fitting end to this series that helped shape the company.

With art, “experimental” usually means either esoteric or neutered: thrilling (but only for the connoisseur), or watered down for the layperson. A Seagull manages to skate past the common pitfalls. Easter eggs for thespians and Chekhov nerds are hidden inside the play’s open dialogue with accessibility. “Everything can’t be weird,” Maureen Porter, playing Arkadina, says in an early monologue directly advising the audience on the balance of riding the avant-garde. “Because then it’s like, how do you know if it’s good?”

Translation is famously tricky with Chekhov. American versions of his plays—which were first written in a direct and muscular Russian over a century ago—lean flowery, says Jacob Coleman, one of PETE’s founding members. Šimek wanted to produce more faithful translations, Coleman says: “bullets coming out of a gun, as opposed to wistful and romantic.”

Chekhov wrote far more than four plays, but The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard are regarded as his most successful and substantial “major” works. PETE and Šimek started in 2014 with The Three Sisters. They staged it in a house, moving with the audience through its rooms, each becoming a different set. But it was more or less traditional. They at least performed the full text. Coleman, who’s acted in all four productions, describes it as an orientation: “How does PETE want to approach Chekhov?”  

It was PETE’s third-ever production, but it went well. They started a series. Šimek was eager to work through the other three plays and PETE was thrilled to help workshop them as he did. Coleman played the title character in PETE’s 2018 follow-up, Uncle Vanya. This one, he says, was “very un-Chekhovian.” Initiated into his oeuvre, the company found “freedom and irreverence,” a “kind of wild permission” to mess with the old master’s work. They mounted the play with a live band like an exuberant cabaret act. It was their most attended production ever. “Maybe it still is,” Coleman says.

By 2022, PETE was ready to start chopping up Chekhov’s scripts. Working directly with the translator created an intimacy and familiarity with the work, Coleman says; “It became a kind of fluid, open invitation.” For The Cherry Orchard, guest director Alice Reagan cut the text in half, got rid of a few characters, and set what was left of the play on a chunk of ice at sea. (Famously, Chekhov produced Uncle Vanya by cutting another of his own plays in half.) Coleman is wearing a Speedo and holding a chainsaw on the poster.

A tone was set. The project’s capstone could be the wildest interpretation yet. In its original form, Chekhov’s Seagull is about a group of Russians at a lake house who, while mounting a play, argue over the state of theater—how to keep the medium alive. It gets dark. Unrequited love, affairs, tuberculosis, and suicide attempts follow. That’s all in PETE’s show, but it’s—delightfully—weirder, and less bleak.

Company member Chris Gonzalez amended the text by doubling down on Chekhov’s self-referential script, adding another metatextual layer—to contextualize a scene, or to have actors relate it to their own off-stage lives. And director Rebecca Lingafelter steered the cast to constantly flip in and out of their roles. This also applied to the stage designers, intermittently costumed as gigantic undead birds, and the production crew, one of whom recites a diatribe against Hollywood picking on theater kids.

“The question we were continuing to bring up to ourselves throughout the process is, like, What are we really doing here?” Coleman says, “and that’s inclusive of the audience.” These ambiguous lines between character and actor, theater and life, are an attempt to open a dialogue between PETE and the public. It became, “What are we all doing here?” Coleman says.

In A Seagull, Coleman plays a scuzzy and promiscuous famed novelist named Trigorin. But it’s hard to tell who exactly he is most of the time. Is it Trigorin who says, “The original Seagull is not boring. You’re fucking boring. Your life … is boring. That said, the original Seagull is kind of boring”? Or is it Coleman, the actor, director, and theater professor of decades?

Turning The Seagull inside out was a way of taking stock of the current moment, of making a play directly about plays to update Chekhov’s 100-year-old question. Not to mention one that, like the original, critiques itself as it plays out. “It’s not something we’re putting on The Seagull,” Coleman says. “It’s something that’s already there.”

In many ways, tracing back this project that’s nearly as old as the company draws a pretty clear picture of how PETE became PETE. Another refrain of the play is the idea of looking back on what you once wanted. After the two-year jump between the third and fourth acts, its characters are either thrilled that their naive hopes and dreams didn’t pan out or disappointed by what achieving them has meant.

Coleman mentions a line Nina, played by Amber Whitehall, delivers in the final scene. She has transformed from an aspiring actor into a real one. And her tortured lover Kostya (Ken Yoshikawa) a real writer. “We’ve arrived,” she says, with a poignant and sincere irony. There’s clearly no such thing as arriving. “It will keep changing,” Coleman says. “But it feels very much like the show is a deep reflection of who we are right now.”

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The Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble’s A Seagull runs through July 13 at the Ellyn Bye Studio at the Armory, $25–45 (BIPOC community comp available).