Before Joanie Schultz brought her gender-swapped adaptation of The Seagull to Quantum Theatre, another work attracted the attention of Karla Boos, the company’s founder and artistic director.
Schultz first came to Pittsburgh as director of Frida … A Self Portrait, and then left for other artistic endeavours, with Boos in pursuit.
J. Cody Spellman, who directed Quantum’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, knew Schultz from working with her in Chicago, and encouraged Boos to catch Vanessa Severo’s one-woman show when it was at Pittsburgh Public Theater in the summer of 2023. Boos recognized a kindred spirit at work behind the scenes, and went to see productions of Schultz’s adaptation of A Doll’s House at Everyman Theatre in Baltimore, and Dracula, another collaboration with Severo, at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, where Schultz serves as associate artistic director.
“It was just so nice to have somebody come see that much of your work,” Schultz said, sitting inside a former estate, now a part of Chatham University and hard by the picturesque Anne Putnam Mallinson ’61 Memorial Pond, where The Seagull will take place.
The director’s dog, a friendly ball of white fluff named Apollo, is the director’s distractingly adorable and ever-present companion.
“I feel like a lot of artistic directors don’t make the time or don’t have the time to be like, ‘There’s an artist I’m interested in. I’m going to keep looking at what they’re doing.’ I thought that showed a real depth of care for the kind of art that she does,” Schultz said, with Apollo hovering.
Outside, on mercifully cool but drizzly Pittsburgh afternoon, the set of The Seagull was taking shape, and rehearsal would begin soon.
Schultz’s adaptation hold’s close to Anton Chekhov’s original, with the exception of gender-swapping the role of Constantine, an eager young writer with ambitions to create a new wave in the theater world, which does not sit well with his mother, Arkadina (Lisa Velton Smith), a traditionalist diva of the Russian stage.
Constantine (Phoebe Lloyd) loves Nina (Julia Rocha), an ambitious young actress, who is infatuated with Arkadina’s lover, the successful writer Trigorin (Brett Mack). Masha (Maxine Coltin) is a young woman who suffers from unrequited love for Constantine, and mismatches abound.
“I’ve seen a lot of Seagulls in my life,” Schultz said, “and I think specifically, I was working in Dallas at the time, and I saw a poster for The Seagull, and I just said, offhandedly to my friend, who was my associate AD at the time, and I was like, I don’t want to see another Seagull until Constantine’s a woman. And then I was like, ‘Hey, that’s kind of a good idea.’ ”
A gender-swapped Constantine is likely to prompt viewer recalculations in the change from a mother-son relationship to a mother-daughter relationship. It also helped Schultz solve a lack of empathy she had always felt toward the character.
“I felt like putting Constantine’s plight into a woman’s mouth, I would then relate to [the character]. And it’s true. It’s like I have been that angsty 25-year-old. I have been in that place where I thought I knew everything, and then it was all destroyed, and I lost the relationship and the theater company and the friends and all of it in one fell swoop. … It’s funny how a gender switch changed so many things.”
Schultz related how her personal journey to find role models could now be reflected in Constantine’s longing for approval and love. Her pursuits led her to Edith Craig, the daughter of the actress Ellen Terry and architect-designer Edward William Godwin, who became a prolific theater artist, director and producer and an avowed suffragette, around the same time The Seagull was first published.
Craig, who directed dozens of plays and founded a couple of notable theater companies, also was her famous mother’s dresser and toured with her.
“Ellen was not married to their dad, and they lived this kind of bohemian life,” Schultz related. “And Edith was a lesbian, and lived with two other women in a throuple for most of her life.”
Craig was able to live openly as a gay woman, Schultz noted, because there were no explicit laws against women being with women and, “Who could tell the difference between some women who were friends and some women who were in a relationship? It’s a foggy area.”
“So knowing all of this about Edith Craig,” the director continued, “I got really inspired. I read a wonderful book about her, Ellen and their relationship. I mean, they were really best friends, and yet there was tension, and I wanted to really see that on stage.”
Reactions to her telling people that Constantine is a woman, and that the story is a queer story in her adaptation, have been met with incredulity.
“They’re like, ‘Oh, that isn’t modern.’ I’m like, ‘No. There were in fact people on all bandwidths, all sorts of areas of sexuality through most of the world.’ So it became all of those things for me to do this play, in this project, in this way. And it’s been really interesting to me how much of Chekhov’s text just really works. You just change he to she, and you’re like, ‘OK, this Constantine comes beautifully out of a non-male body,’ I must say.”
The opportunity to explore a classic on her own terms has been boon from a company that she describes as being “very artist and art forward.”
Rounding out the Seagull cast are veteran actor Ken Bolden as Sorin, a retired, elderly, landowner and brother of Arkadina, along with Paul Anderson, Gwendolyn Kelso, Daniell Krell, and Evan Vine.
In a bit of Pittsburgh kismet, the creative team includes scenic design by Chelsea Warren, a longtime collaborator of Schultz’s who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.
Boos’ pursuit of Schultz’s work has been a boon that keeps on giving.
“I mean, what a gift to have somebody say, ‘Great, let’s do it,’” Schultz said of presenting The Seagull as a queer story. “And she found this beautiful place to do it, and that’s been awesome. I mean, yesterday, we were doing a run-through, and there’s just like deer in the scenery, and you’re like, ‘OK. This is perfect.’ ”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Quantum Theatre’s production of The Seagull runs Tuesday-Sunday, 8 p.m. (no late seating), July 25 – August 17, 2025, alongside Anne Putnam Mallinson ’61 Memorial Pond, on the campus of Chatham University.
Originally published by our partners at onStage Pittsburgh on July 13, 2025.
