In its mission statement, the American Repertory Theatre describes itself as a "vital cultural resource" for its community. But, the role of any cultural resource, as Brandeis is beginning to understand, must be battled for, as it cannot merely be proclaimed. So ART's mission, much like that of any public arts institution with ambitious scope, involves a constant struggle for relevance among the very community it hopes to serve. As the more traditional theatergoing community (wealthy, white and venerably aged) becomes busier and busier with kicking their own buckets, this has meant a deeper focus on the young, the trendy-and the typically-uninterested-in-plays. It means, in other words, that they are marketing to us.

This newfound ploy is both unexpected and unavoidable upon entering ART's Loeb Drama Center. The Brattle Street Theater maintains a veneer of cultured worldliness in leather and glass, but its publicity banners look like indie album covers. The staff is consciously hip and wants to pointedly ask where you bought your skinny jeans. One is inundated with a newly printed scheme of posters, shouting in block text that this is "NOT YOUR PARENTS' THEATER."

Which, indeed, it isn't. The ART's recent production of Anton Chekhov's masterpiece The Seagull, will not be accused of pandering to anyone's outdated mores nor of leaving any aging subscribers snoring -for one thing, the Guns 'n' Roses music blared into the audience tends to ward off sleepiness. Director János Szász introduces his audiences to a Chekhov who rips himself free of the preciousness of historicized staging, eschewing samovars and high collars for a gritty and surreal David Lynch atmosphere. Here, crumbling, frescoed ceilings leak rain onto the stage, fading velour seats are swung out of their rows into crazy diagonals, and skinny girls careen in five-inch heels through standing water and cigarette smoke. Szász has exploded the bourgeois sitting rooms of classical Chekhov staging for his production, leaving both the stage and characters constantly exposed. "Sometimes," Szász writes in his program notes, "Chekhov is like the Greeks- so much happens offstage and between the acts. We're trying to make everything visible and immediate in this production. We're trying to put everything on the table-the lies, the affairs, the betrayals, the shame, the compromises, the sex and the passion."

And everything is visible. Szász is also a film director, notable as he builds his narrative into a series of haunting images: white feathered wings, enormous piles of luggage, real rainstorms, sex acts that are somehow architectural. One would be amiss, though, to call The Seagull filmic; the images have a depth and mobility in the space that can only be theatrical, as if an understanding of both media brings into focus the unique strengths of each. We wonder almost voyeuristically at the nature and immediacy of these strange people and the apocalyptic dreamscape in which they live. Karen MacDonald as Arkadina (the play's paradigmatically monstrous mother figure), throws herself into unglamorous sexual theatrics that are almost embarrassing to watch. Nina Kassa's Masha (who, according to the script, "always wears black") sulks around the edges of the stage in full goth, clutching a bottle of Stolichnaya, smoking too much. And Jeremy Geidt as Sorin (perhaps the most likable character onstage; also the most senile and immobile) is often covered in crumbs of something and keeps falling asleep with his mouth open. With no real exits, the characters have to sit around, bored and waiting, without any real regard for an emergent plot. But, for this play, it works. The poetics of real exposure that were Chekhov's concern find an outlet in the constant visibility that Szász allows his actors. The treatment of the play pushes on naturalism and makes it daring again.

That notion of daring, though, is one that we have to acknowledge deeply when we talk about this play. ART-again, perhaps eager to attract a young and tech-savvy audience base-has set up a blog on its Web site, where audiences can post and discuss thoughts on the production. The reactions, if not uniform, have been uniformly strong. The production is, for some, "phenomenal"; it "creates a communal space, a collective spirit that exists only once, a social body that is immediately created and destroyed in a climactic two hours but whose life will remain in the eternal space of memory." For others, it is "like being in jail with waterboarding. So self-indulgent and nonengaging."

And these reactions, to some extent, are both spot-on. Szász frames his production in the consciousness of Konstantin, a young writer with a tortured vision of the world who is eventually driven to suicide. The first act of The Seagull centers around a play he's written-a bleakly symbolist musing that's largely unintelligible. But Szász is fascinated by Konstantin and by the truth that comes through in his imperfect expression of the way he sees the world. "Konstantin's play is not a perfect play, but it is an honest play," he writes, "Everyone around him has developed routines in order to survive. And those routines involve a lot of lies. Lies in their relationships with each other. Lies about their art. Lies to themselves. ... They've all managed to survive by lying. But Konstantin can't lie."

Ought we, then, to accept opacity and self-indulgence for the sake of artistic truth? The boundary-pushing production seems to raise the question with every free-form saxophone sound cue. And Szász, though perhaps identifying with Konstantin's plight, offers no answer. What he has offered in The Seagull is a space where that question can expand, and where we're forced to deal with the opacity of experimentation in a very immediate way. Indeed, as audience members left the theater, their responses were oddly aligned with what had happened onstage: wives complaining to husbands about how loud the music was, college students in trendy glasses talking ecstatically about the artful subtleties of the concept, thirty-somethings who just wondered where the female lead's shoes came from. The Seagull is, in some ways, a play about the strange relationship between art and life. And staged at ART this year, in an economic climate that makes us preoccupied with the relevance of art, among a community so necessarily concerned as its audience evaporates into the margins, that issue becomes deep-deep and awkwardly real.