The Seagull, a spectacular failure on its first appearance, was the play that, on its second, established Anton Chekhov as an important and revolutionary dramatist. Here, amid the weariness of life in the country, the famous actress Arkadina presides over a household riven with desperate love, with dreams of success and dread of failure. It is her son, Konstantin, who one day shoots a seagull; it is the novelist Trigorin who will one day write the story of the seagull herself, whose life to come will rewrite the story.