Making A Forward Leap

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: THE SEAGULL

AUTHOR: ANTON CHEKHOV

WHERE: BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: Its fizzled debut season behind it, Tony Randall's national troupe offers its first creditable production.

Every few years, someone tries to launch a national ensemble to perform the classics, an American equivalent to London's Royal National troupe or Paris' Comedie-Francaise. But the effort has always foundered, often over questions of how to finance it or because the very scope of the ambition stirred audience expectations that no start-up group is likely to meet.

Last season Tony Randall brought his National Actors Theater to Broadway with an overwrought version of The Crucible, an unfunny slog through Feydeau's farce A Little Hotel on the Side and a stupefyingly overacted rendition of The Master Builder. At season's end, executive producer Manny Kladitis said, "We know there were problems, but give us a chance. A company has to walk before it can run."

Last week the Randall troupe opened a second season with, as promised, a heartening leap forward. Its staging of The Seagull is imperfect and at times campy, taking too literally Chekhov's admonition that his plays are comedies. But it tells the story beautifully and has several interesting ideas about the text.

Jon Voight, returning to Broadway for the first time in 25 years, gives an unshowy performance as the celebrity writer Trigorin that subtly conveys the character's lonely, inward-looking obsession with his craft. As the actress Arkadina, Tyne Daly stresses monstrous self-absorption. Not for Daly the customary dotty unawareness of how she puts down her son, a would-be avant- garde playwright; each belittling gesture is calculated cruelty. As the son, Ethan Hawke solves the play's pivotal problem, foreshadowing the youth's instability and making clear why he and not his at-wit's-end beloved, Nina, commits suicide.

In the staging by director Marshall Mason and set designer Marjorie Bradley Kellogg, the first act takes place outdoors, by a lake where Arkadina humiliates her son in his first artistic venture. Although the action gradually moves indoors, the trees never disappear. They stand throughout at the stage's edge, silent sentinels recalling the bitter moment that brings on all the play's ruin.