Forget Russia. Forget fin de siècle. Forget everything you thought you knew about Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” Behind each piece of theater that really affects you, there is a deeper truth, and it is not always pretty. There are skeletons in all closets and elephants in every room. “PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER!” started as a strange dream—and it is striving to be a 21st century exploration of the deepest, murkiest ID of a particularly brilliant play about a particularly nasty bunch of people drowning in the quicksand of unrequited love—but with a glass of champagne (or vodka) in their hands.

In an ongoing series of open studio presentations, WaxFactory invited the viewers to take a peek behind the process of shaping the work’s characters under the direction of Ivan Talijancic, who came up with the idea for the project in a dream. While the work is characterized by a distinctly surrealistic touch, the characters are real. Real as in, you know people like them.

If you know the play, you may recognize them, if only by pure hunch. Shamrayev is a woman and hustles the real estate market in the Hamptons. Ma(r)sha is a high-strung offspring of two mothers. Maid has a hard-to-pronounce name and a complicated Eastern Bloc background. Bernard (Medvedenko), and his hipster attire would make him fit right in at a Bushwick gastropub. The May 2016 showing at 3LD Center was the fourth in a series of developmental studies, which is ongoing.