Seagull: True Story

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It has been three years since Putin’s ill-fated military incursion into Ukraine—a failed blitz that nonetheless sparked a grinding, protracted war. From the rubble of that geopolitical debacle has emerged, among other tragic consequences, a wave of émigré Russian artists seeking refuge and reinvention. Few venues in New York have extended as generous an embrace as La MaMa, the downtown institution whose commitment to international and avant-garde work remains unwavering. We are enriched by having these artists.

Now premiering at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre in a co-production with the MART Foundation and En Garde Arts, Seagull: True Story is a barbed, meta-theatrical cri de coeur from creator-director Alexander Molochnikov, with a script by Eli Rarey. Drawing heavily on Molochnikov’s own experiences, the piece is not a retelling of Chekhov but a searing dispatch from the frontlines of artistic exile. It charts not only the cultural deep freeze imposed by Putin’s regime but also turns its gaze, with mordant wit, on the subtler constraints of the American arts ecosystem. The production skewers both overt authoritarianism and the velvet-gloved mechanisms of Western cultural gatekeeping with equal parts satire and sorrow. Bitterly funny and disarmingly candid, the play asks whether escape from tyranny guarantees liberation—or whether a different kind of captivity awaits on this side of the ocean.

When Seagull: True Story opens, it is February 2022, and inside the hallowed halls of the Moscow Art Theatre, young director Kon (played with endearing, wide-eyed idealism by Eric Tabach) is deep into rehearsals for a bold reinterpretation of The Seagull. This isn’t a reverent revival; it’s a pointed reinvention. Men in skirts swirl across the stage in an ecstatic ballet of liberation, a vision of freedom set against the backdrop of a play that once defined the Russian soul. But history, as ever, has other plans. The curtain hasn’t yet risen when the Russian invasion of Ukraine breaks through the fourth wall of Kon’s production, fracturing his cast—and his world. What begins as an artistic experiment quickly devolves into a battleground of ideology.

Andrey Burkovskiy’s Yuri, the theatre’s executive producer, emerges as the play’s bureaucratic antagonist—a man less villain than functionary, sweating bullets over Kon’s queer-coded choreography and its potential violation of Russia’s draconian “LGBT propaganda” laws. Yuri demands edits. Most chillingly, he demands a statement—an endorsement of the war, a nod to the state, a small price to pay for continued state support. For Kon, who clings to the ideals of artistic freedom like a lifeline, the ask is existential. His mother may play Arkadina, but he is living Treplev’s nightmare: creating in a world where the cost of vision may be too high to bear. Here Seagull: True Story becomes a taut, timely inquiry into the collision between state power and personal conviction. It captures the tragic absurdity of trying to stage truth in a theater owned by the lie.

Zuzanna Szadkowski brings both grandeur and emotional gravity to the role of Olga, Kon’s mother and his Arkadina, embodying the tragic ambivalence of an artist caught between loyalty and legacy. In one of the play’s most blisteringly intimate scenes, Olga, the grande dame of Russian stage and mother to our earnest young director Kon, delivers a line that lands like a dagger: “You think you would have been hired to direct this if I wasn’t your mommy?” It’s a maternal gut-punch dressed in theatrical realpolitik, and Szadkowski delivers it with the steel and precision of a woman who has long wielded both motherhood and fame as weapons. The line between Olga and Arkadina blurs into a single, caustic force—equal parts love, ego, and survival instinct. She doesn’t merely break her son’s illusions—she salts the earth so they can’t grow back. It’s a moment that captures the deep generational fault lines not just between artists, but between eras, nations, and moral calculations. For Kon, this is the price of clarity: the realization that he is not only his mother’s son, but also his own man—and a man now in flight.

And so he flees. On the very night his radical Seagull is set to premiere, Kon slips out of Russia, chasing a dream of unfiltered expression in the United States. But the American promised land proves less golden than grimy. Gone is the velvet grandeur of the Moscow Art Theatre; in its place, a dusty warehouse in Bushwick, where Kon now lives cheek-by-jowl with a collective of emotionally overextended Brooklynites and his new lover, Nico (played with simmering charm by Stella Baker).

The irony isn’t lost on anyone. “He comes all the way from Russia to live with communists,” quips our ever-present MC, a chorus-like figure whose deadpan wit gives the piece much of its bite. It’s a line that encapsulates the show’s deeper theme: the strange, sometimes absurd dissonance between escaping one kind of ideological control only to land squarely in another. Kon may have fled the old world, but in Seagull: True Story, freedom proves just as slippery in the new one. His journey from state-sanctioned prestige to avant-garde obscurity is both humbling and hilarious—a postmodern pilgrimage through exile, art, and the uneasy politics of self-expression.

Among the many sharp turns and tonal pivots in Seagull: True Story, none are navigated with more dexterity than those handled by Burkovskiy, who delivers a standout performance as the show’s omnipresent MC. A chameleonic narrator-slash-ringmaster, Burkovskiy slides effortlessly between roles—Yuri, the anxious Russian producer; Barry, his brash American counterpart; and even the Russian president himself, entering shirtless astride a horse. In his hands, “Fantastic!” becomes a punchline and a prophecy, uttered with forced gusto some fifteen times over, each iteration more hollow and unnerving than the last. It’s a deliciously biting send-up of the kind of performative positivity endemic to producers who love the idea of theater—so long as they don’t have to actually feel anything onstage. He doesn’t just impersonate these figures—he indicts them, with a smile and a sequined jacket.

If Burkovskiy supplies the evening’s dazzle and venom, Elan Zafir brings its quiet soul. As Anton, Kon’s loyal dramaturg and conscience, Zafir offers a performance of devastating restraint. He is the one who stays behind when Kon flees to America, the one who dares to speak out against the war and pays dearly for it. In a letter sent from a gulag—read with such aching composure it nearly halts the play’s rhythm—Anton writes, “I wonder if they have put all the interesting people in prison now. How dull the conversation in cafés must be these days.” Zafir doesn’t ask for our sympathy; he earns it, line by line, in a performance that reminds us of the cost of conviction—and the true meaning of exile. In a play full of ironies, absurdities, and tragicomic turns, Anton’s voice rings out as the clearest and most human.

A pitch-black but unexpectedly generous humor runs through Rarey’s script for Seagull: True Story, a play unafraid to bite the hand that funds—or stifles—it. While much of the show critiques state censorship and authoritarian absurdity in Russia, its sharpest, most uncomfortable barbs are reserved for the more insidious cultural anxieties plaguing American theater.

Nowhere is this clearer than in a scene set in a dilapidated Bushwick rehearsal space, where the young cast’s ideological hand-wringing threatens to derail what’s left of Kon’s artistic vision. After one actor dismisses Chekhov as yet another “dead white male,” the omnipresent MC chimes in with deadpan cheer: “Here we used to have a Brechtian song about social issues. It was extremely offensive! So we had to cut it.” The line lands like a grenade tossed with a wink—a moment of self-satire that doubles as a serious critique of the hypersensitive, often contradictory performance of progressivism in American theater circles.

Is it just a clever theatrical device, or a veiled confession about the development process behind this very production? Rarey and director Molochnikov refuse to clarify—and that ambiguity is the point. The fact that the audience is left wondering whether the joke is on us—or by us—is the most telling commentary of all. In a play that skewers both propaganda and puritanism, the biggest laugh might also be the most damning mirror.

There’s little time to dwell on the implications of any one moment in Seagull: True Story—not because they don’t resonate, but because the production barrels forward with an energy that is both irreverent and relentless. Under the direction of Molochnikov, the show moves with scrappy, kaleidoscopic verve. It’s resourceful, restless, and deeply alive, making ingenious use of the simplest materials—plastic sheeting, a dingy air mattress, and a bathtub on wheels all feature prominently in Alexander Shishkin’s industrial, evocative set design. These objects serve not just as scenery but as metaphors for displacement and disorientation, echoing the play’s themes of exile, identity, and reinvention.

Kristina Kharlashkina’s costume design draws an especially sharp line between East and West. The shift between Acts One and Two—Russia to Bushwick—is stark, witty, and telling. Her work underscores not only the cultural dissonance between Russian and American actors, but also the unifying influence of capital: no matter the continent, the men writing the checks tend to dress the same.

Lighting designers Brian H. Scott and Sam Saliba weave together theatrical flair and practical necessity with deft precision. A single desk lamp becomes a surprisingly pivotal tool, emblematic of the show’s ability to conjure intimacy and meaning from minimal means. And in Diego Las Heras’ sound design, the distant war isn’t merely referenced—it’s felt with low, thunderous rumbles creeping under the floorboards. Together, this creative team delivers a production that punches far above its budget, affirming that necessity remains the mother of invention—and in this case, of urgent, unforgettable theater.

What ultimately emerges in Seagull: True Story is not just a tale of exile and reinvention, but a portrait of a director undeterred by the collapse of his artistic infrastructure. Faced with a drastically reduced budget and far from the gilded prosceniums of the Moscow Art Theatre, Alexander Molochnikov embraces the chaos. It’s a trait that will soon be less a virtue than a necessity, as funding for the arts continues to evaporate for all but those willing to flatter power, wealth, or both.

The show’s resourcefulness is itself a commentary on the new artistic survivalism. In a moment when even American institutions—long underfunded at the federal level—are increasingly beholden to donors, branding deals, and ideological whims, the choice facing international dissidents isn’t as starkly moral as we might like to believe. The golden shackles of authoritarian cultural privilege glitter temptingly beside the fraying shoestrings of Western independence.

Seagull: True Story refuses to sentimentalize that dilemma. It understands the bitter irony that freedom, in the American context, often comes with a price tag. For the lucky few who manage to escape regimes like Putin’s, the question becomes: What now? Do you trade security and stature for the precarity of artistic integrity in a system where nothing—housing, healthcare, even rehearsal space—is guaranteed? Or do you find ways to make peace with compromise? This is the play’s central, unsettling question, and Molochnikov’s answer is neither triumphant nor despairing—it is simply honest. Through humor, satire, and scrappy ingenuity, Seagull: True Story reveals the true cost of creative freedom, not as a noble abstraction, but as a daily, grinding negotiation with power, relevance, and the rent.

Seagull:True Story (through June 1, 2025)

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in association with MART Foundation & EnGarde Arts

Ellen Stewart Theatre, 66 East 4th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.ci.ovationtix.com

Running time: two hours and thirty minutes including one intermission