Belova ~ Iacobelli Theatre Company: Chayka

The Paradox of the Actress

An Essay by Marissa Fenley

Belova ~ Iacobelli Theatre Company’s Chayka follows the final performance of an aging actress, Chayka, in the role of Arkadina in Chekhov’s The Seagull. Throughout the performance Chayka is often disoriented, forgetful, and resistant; she forgets her lines, confuses the events of the play with her real life, and complains about the “minimalist” staging choices. Chayka is not just an elegy for the actress but a meditation on acting itself. 

Chayka is represented by a human-arm puppet, operated by Tita Iacobelli, who is not only her puppeteer but a character in the story. Chayka has one prosthetic arm that hangs loosely at her side, and the other is supplied by one of Iacobelli’s arms, while the performer’s free arm manipulates Chayka’s head and her legs double as Chayka’s. Chayka’s head is sculpted with great detail and realistic glass eyes, and while her facial features are static, they gain expressiveness as light and shadows play upon her grooved, wrinkled face. She wears a short blond wig and a satin robe, while Iacobelli is dressed in all black except for her face. As Iacobelli peeks around her puppet, often whispering in her ear or looking over her shoulder, her youthful features are highlighted by her giant black headband, which creates a marked contrast to the aging Chayka. As the show progresses, Iacobelli herself begins to act , adopting the role of Nina—the young aspiring actress who threatens the aging veteran actress of Arkadina.  

Chayka enters the stage muttering to herself. She flips between Nina’s lines from Chekhov’s play  and her own worries about when the performance will start. Is she late? Her puppeteer wakes her from her reverie: “Chayka!” she hisses in her ear. “Where am I?” Chayka asks. “At the theater!” her puppeteer reminds her. She is already onstage and must act—the public is here, waiting to see her final performance. The set, however, much like our somnambulistic actress, is similarly suspended and deactivated. A table and chair are covered with white dust cloths, as are various, disguised objects on the table. The actress and her theater have lain dormant, and we are watching them both awakening after a long hiatus. 

In this world, acting and living are synonymous. In fact as a puppet, Chayka is only “active” when she is acting. Her name is also the Russian word for “seagull” and the original title for Chekhov’s play. “But I am not a seagull; I am an actress,” Chayka tells us, repeating Nina’s famous line, which recurs frequently throughout the show. Chayka—who has played all the female roles from The Seagull, beginning with Masha, peaking as Nina, declining as Paulina, and now finally resurrected as Arkadina—is the play. Where the actress begins and The Seagull ends becomes increasingly difficult to parse. In fact, Chayka cannot differentiate between her own life experiences and the roles she has played. “I’ve been a mother 25 times,” Chayka tells her puppeteer, “Medea, Phaedra, Grusha, Mother Courage, Gertrude, Jocasta.” And just as she has birthed these maternal roles, Chayka similarly animates the other characters onstage. Trigorin—the writer and Arkadina’s lover—is represented by a book and Arkadina’s son, Konstantin, by a teddy bear, while Nina is represented by a gauzy pink scarf. The arm that Chayka and her puppeteer share is the same arm that animates these objects. In many ways, we see the other characters as mere extensions of Chayka herself; however, we also see them as animated by the same power that animates Chayka. Belova ~ Iacobelli thus shows us that the actress is at once animated and animating. She does not simply perform as herself; she brings the play to life. 

However, to perform oneself and one’s world into being is itself a dangerous conceit. Chayka’s own maternal power—a kind of power that is also elided with the power of the actress—has led her to play mothers who are almost all responsible for the death of their children in one way or another. Much as Arkadina’s love of the stage led her to neglect her son, it seems that to act and to mother are competing impulses toward giving life—to create in one arena is to drain life from the other. In fact, acting is almost always draining. In another scene, Chayka, unable to remember the words to the play, decides to act the next scene without text, and her puppeteer is to direct her. Iacobelli tells Chayka to put the book—Trigorin—on the sofa chair. Chayka then rolls Trigorin center stage. Chayka approaches the chair in order to seduce him. She leans on the back of the chair and it rolls away. “He’s leaving,” Chayka remarks. Iacobelli then directs Chayka to play coy—to hide and shiver in order to earn Trigorin’s sympathy. The chair remains inert, unresponsive—he is not swayed. Chayka then throws herself on the chair, inadvertently pushing him further away. She desperately grabs the arm of the chair to pull him back. She then extends her leg in a seductive yet awkward gesture, but she loses her balance and the chair rolls out from under her. Chayka then mounts the chair, slaps it (him) about, then slaps herself in a frenzy of sadomasochism. She then hops off the chair and walks away, victorious. The chair’s stasis has been transformed from passive resistance to dominated compliance. Chayka then returns to the chair having successfully wooed Trigorin into submission and slumps in exhaustion from her wild exertions. 

In this way Belova ~ Iacobelli playfully re-creates the seduction scene between Arkadina and Trigorin in Act III of The Seagull. In typical portrayals, Arkadina displays her acting prowess as she rapidly changes tactics to win back Trigorin’s affections from Nina. She shifts between fawning over, pleading, belittling, and flattering him. Chekhov makes clear that Arkadina is acting for her life—and conversely, that her life, even in love, is just acting. In Chayka, however, we see both the exhaustion and powerlessness of this condition. The chair is fundamentally unable to actively participate in the seduction scene and thus can only be withholding or acquiescent. In response to Chayka’s overtures, Trigorin-as-armchair can only roll away or be pulled toward her. To sustain the scene, Chayka must do all the work. And, similarly, her relationships with others are only sustained by her continued will to act. To be an actress is much like being a puppet or a taxidermied bird: To give something life is always coupled with the knowledge that it does not have life in the first place. One cannot be both a seagull and an actress, Chekhov tells us, and thus Chayka’s position is a paradoxical one. The many actresses in The Seagull are both the victims of the play and its primary engine. And in Chayka we see the impossibility of this condition directly manifested.