A student at the University of Michigan has just left the hospital after a six-week-long bout of hepatitis. Stepping straight from his sickbed to the stage, he joins a production of Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull. He plays the lead, Konstantin Treplev, and his friend Syd is in the role of Treplev's love interest, Nina Zarechniy. Directing them is the tyrannical Egon, who plays the writer Boris Trigorin. Egon insists that his troupe practices the Stanislavsky Method, an extreme form of method acting, so as to play their parts more authentically. Even outside of the theatre, they must live as their characters. All of the actors suffer greatly in the weeks before their performance, both on account of the method acting and Egon's verbal abuse on stage, except, apparently, for Syd. Nevertheless, Treplev realizes that she is unhappy in the extreme as they begin to spend time together outside of rehearsal. Though he cannot yet name the emotion, he is already falling in love with her. Syd's misery becomes clear only after the play's run comes to an end. Instead of attending their cast party, she waits for Treplev in the theatre and asks him to take her somewhere. Over late-night pastries, she tells him everything. She is pregnant, and Egon, the father, is cheating on her. In tears, she asks Treplev for help, and he obliges. He finds her a place to have an abortion, nurses her back to health afterward, and tells no one. A few weeks after they return to campus, they fall in love and are married.