The discussion about The Seagull has got me thinking again about the differences between 19th- and 20th-century theater. I don’t really believe in the timelessness of art, and Chekhov’s plays, like any works of art, will change in the feelings and thoughts that it evokes in its audiences over time, because the audiences themselves change over time.

This is unavoidable because art itself depends on making use of the audience’s unconscious expectations, symbolic meanings, conventions, shared attitudes and experiences, and so on. The artist’s use of those things, both skillfully and intuitively, to evoke thoughts and feelings in the audience is the very thing that gives art its power.

One major reason, I think, that Chekhov can seem puzzling to a modern American audience is that we no longer have the same expectations of the theater and the same history of shared theatrical experiences and attitudes and references that Chekhov’s audience did. I think this is also an obstacle to our really understanding Ibsen and Shaw and even David Belasco and all sorts of playwrights from around that period. The theater was going through enormous changes, and all these playwrights were writing very much in reaction to the older theater. Shaw, for example, loved to start a play with a clichéd situation of the popular theater of the time, and then turn it on its head and say, you’ve seen this in the theater a hundred times but now I’m going to show you how it is in real life. And a lot of the comedy stems from the counterpoint, the differences, between the familiar expectations of the audience and what actually happens this time.

It’s the same thing that happens in, say, Into the Woods, where a lot of the fun comes from the way our knowledge and expectations derived from the familiar fairy tales comes into conflict with what we see really happening. We’re set up to expect this, and then that happens. If we’d never heard of, say, Little Red Riding Hood before, a lot of the fun of her part in the musical would be lost.

But in the case of these late 19th-century/early 20th-century playwrights like Chekhov and Ibsen and Shaw, the theater they were rebelling against has been thoroughly dead for so long that the audience doesn’t come in with the same expectations. They see that happen, and all they think is, Look, that happened. They weren’t expecting this to happen in the first place, and half the point of that is invisible to them.

Here’s one important way in which I think Chekhov overturned the unspoken conventions of the theater of his time: The popular melodrama of the 19th century was about characters who did things to get what they want. Characters were straightforward: Each character had a goal and each character acted so as to try to get what he or she wanted. If the hero wanted to marry the heroine, he put on his best behavior as he wooed her; if the villain wanted to break up the engagement and force her to marry him instead, he forged the hero’s signature on a love letter to another woman and purchased the mortgage to her father’s farm so that he could threaten to foreclose. The interest came from watching the conflicts among these cross purposes work themselves out; if any one character were free to pursue his or her goals without the interference of the other characters, he or she would surely achieve them.

Chekhov, though, wrote about characters who are constantly shooting themselves in the foot, who do have goals but either those goals are unrealistic and unachievable or else the characters will not act in ways that would bring those goals closer. Chekhov’s characters suffer, but he shows us that nearly all of them have created their own suffering. They have created their own ruts, but he makes it plain to us that each of them could escape his or her rut simply by stepping out of it and walking away. None of them ever does.

To audiences accustomed to a theater in which characters behaved sensibly in order to achieve their stated goals, this must have seemed baffling. But Chekhov was, I think, saying, People aren’t like that in real life! This is how they are: They shoot themselves in the foot and they refuse to change even when change would plainly alleviate their miseries!

Nowadays, though, the idea that people can be neurotically unable to break out of recurring and self-defeating patterns of behavior is commonplace, and we have every expectation of seeing it represented in the theater. And I think people go to something like The Seagull and of course they know, they’ve been told that the play is a great classic and that it was revolutionary and so on, but they only know that intellectually, they don’t feel what it was about the play that caused such strong reactions at the time.

Which may be a shame, or maybe it isn’t. It seems inevitable to me, in any case. Society changes from one place to another and from one time to another. Somebody in the discussion last night used the word “evolved”, but that has a connotation of progress that I’m not sure I agree with. I don’t think modern theatrical taste is better than the taste of 19th-century audiences; I think it’s just different, and if the “progress” in theater had run in the opposite direction, I’m pretty sure that we would have no trouble believing that our taste for good strong melodrama was superior to the taste for psychological truth.

It is just the opposite in, say, painting, isn’t it? 150 years ago, the paintings that got the most praise from critics and academics were naturalistic; today they are abstract, and the critics and academics will remind you at every opportunity how superior it is to appreciate a painting for its own sake, as an arrangement of fields of color, than as a reflection of reality. While 150 years ago, the plays that got the most praise from critics and academics were unrealistic — abstract, you might say — and were praised for their skillful construction, and actors for their larger-than-life qualities; nobody even dreamed of going to the theater for a dose of lifelike psychological truth. And nowadays what we value in theater and in acting is naturalism, and it’s accepted as a commonplace and obvious truth that this is artistically and even morally superior than the popular farces and melodramas of 150 years ago.

I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the theater of the last 150 years, or that I’d rather trade away Ibsen and Shaw and Chekhov to get back those farces and melodramas. I’m just saying I think a lot of what gets touted as progress in theater is really just change.

Dave and I saw Ice Glen at the Aurora Theater Sunday night, and then noticed in the program that they were holding a free discussion group the following night, part of a new series called “The Script Club”, in which people read a play and then meet to discuss it. Apparently the play to be read is always chosen in order to complement in some way the current play at the Aurora.

The play chosen for last night’s discussion was The Seagull, so I reread it on the commute home from work yesterday (in Michael Frayn’s very readable translation), and then Dave and I attended the discussion.

Dave and I both liked Ice Glen a lot. It’s a delightful comedy with some interesting issues to chew on, and it’s wonderfully well acted. A poet has been living for a long time with a friend in a big old house in the country in Massachusetts in 1919. She almost never shows her poems, though, to anyone.

Somehow three of her poems have landed on the desk of the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and he wants very badly to publish them. He travels to the country to try to persuade her, and he becomes infatuated with her.

The owner of the house is the widow of a brilliant and outgoing man. She is lonely, reclusive, and badly misses the circle of her husband’s friends who used to frequent the house. She is attracted to the editor and tries to interest him in herself. The results of these three people’s cross purposes are what drives the play.

The choice of The Seagull was curious. Both plays are comedies about artists, and both touch on the struggle to create art, but their themes seem quite different to me. One parallel that struck me right away is that Ice Glen has a smaller version of the “A is in love with B, who is sick of A but is love with C, who is sick of B but is in love with D …” structure that runs through The Seagull: In Ice Glen, the widow, Dulce, desires the editor, Peter, who desires the poet, Sarah. And Sarah is in love with a bear who comes to visit her. Or maybe she’s imagining the bear, or perhaps the bear is just a metaphor she uses in her poems — we’re never quite sure.

Someone in the discussion group also brought up the use of class distinctions in both plays — the household in Ice Glen includes three servants — but neither of these parallels struck me as terribly meaningful.

And there’s a very big thematic difference between the two plays: The Seagull is about people who are stuck in ruts, and while they complain about their ruts, they choose to stay in them. It’s about a lot of people who are working at being artists but, whatever their degree of worldly success, not one of them is capturing life in his or her own art.

Ice Glen, on the other hand, is about people who are likewise stuck in ruts, but through their interactions and quarrels and missteps they eventually find a way to move out of them, and as the play ends all three have taken important steps toward significant changes in their lives. And the poet is presented to us as being genuinely talented, someone with the skill to capture something of life in her work. Not the same sort of theme as The Seagull at all.

Dave, though, came up with a startling insight while the discussion went on: Ice Glen, he noticed, has a great many thematic elements in common with another Chekhov play, the one-act comedy The Bear. The setting in both is a house in the country. The two main characters in each are a reclusive woman still pining over a painful past relationship (a description true of Sarah as well as of Dulce in Ice Glen) and a man who comes to her country home on business and falls in love with her, eventually drawing her out of her shell. There are three letters whose whereabouts are an important plot device in The Bear, just as the three poems are in Ice Glen.

And of course there’s the bear.

The more we have thought about it and discussed it since, the more Dave and I are convinced that Ice Glen is very freely but very deliberately modeled on The Bear. The structure is so similar, and there are so many things that look like deliberate hints and winks on the part of the author.

Ice Glen is playing for one more week. Dave and I are hoping to find a night we can go back and see it one more time, and I’m also hoping I’ll have the time to reread The Bear by then so it will be fresh in my mind.