Watching Chekhov’s The Seagull via The Sims is riveting theater

Okay, we get it. This might seem like a bit of a niche story. Some people will see the words ‘Chekhov’ and/or ‘The Sims’ and their eyes will glaze right over. If you are such a person, fine, but if you are also a person who cares about pop culture—and your visit to this very website would suggest you are—then stick around and let’s get real artsy-fartsy for a few minutes.
Over the course of two nights as a part of New York Theater Workshop’s virtual 2020-21 season, playwright Celine Song staged a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull via a Twitch stream of The Sims 4. It is, given just a little patience, absolutely riveting, and in New York Magazine, theater critic Helen Shaw does a marvelous job of explaining why.
“We must have new forms,” says Konstantin, the tormented writer hero of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. Desperate for approval, Konstantin (Kostya to his friends) boils with “guy from my MFA” energy. He’s sure he’s underappreciated, though his aesthetic revolution sounds a lot like unoriginal dreck. You can see him, can’t you? Glasses, a little beard, a T-shirt with a skull on it?
At least that was the Konstantin collaboratively assembled in Celine Song’s (actually revolutionary) The Seagull on The Sims 4. One of the offerings from New York Theatre Workshop’s virtual season, Song’s two-night, nearly six-hour Seagull was head and wings above other experiments in digital theater. It was often deeply absorbing, if in its second half occasionally exhausting. At every moment, though, it felt like a brand-new genre, confident and fully formed at birth.