Part of The Public Theater’s Under the Radar 2019….
I Am A Seagull follows a community of actors in their frenzied and loving attempt to stage a Chekhov play in their front yard.
Life and rehearsal blend together in this filmic portrait of The Seagull, an abiding fable that plumbs the splendors and hazards of our human need to create art and make contact with one another. The play is interpreted by a handful of top shelf stage actors from New York City as they converge in an upstate lakeside retreat where they live and breathe Chekhov. Surrounded by a menagerie of paper lanterns, circus tents, ten-foot tall puppets and floating furniture, the players merge with the reckless choices of their characters. In full view of their fellow artists as well as a wider participating audience, the performers’ most intimate impulses are splayed open and made public.
Through juxtaposing phases of rehearsal, live performance and pure cinema this hybrid documentary captures the idealism, contradictions and raw instinct that fuels theatre-making itself. An art form that bursts into life for a brief moment, witnessed by a committed few, and then disappears.
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