The beauty embedded in the work of early modernist Russian playwright Anton Chekhov rests in its elasticity. There are the period plays, set in Moscow country dachas, the articulate women corseted, the men dapper and talkative in bowlers and suspenders. But Chekhov was, and remains, more than a century after his early death at age 44, a man for all seasons and, so it seems, all eras. Chekhov, of course, was not a Jew, but as a member of the Russian intelligentsia living at the end of the 19th century, he was familiar with Jews. For a short while, Chekhov was even engaged to a Jewish woman. But his plays are not intrinsically Jewish.

Or are they?

That was the question that tantalized playwright/artistic director Ari Roth into his latest project at Theater J: The Seagull on 16th Street, a world-premiere revisioning of Chekhov's beloved early play The Seagull, known as much for its linguistic muscularity as for its sprawling cast of disaffected malcontents and unrequited lovers.

As Roth rethinks the Russian character and reframes Chekhov's cast as Jews, he keeps Chekhov's sturdy bones and rewrites his upper-middle-class Russians as secularized fin de siecle Jews and their contemporaries. The result is a production that revitalizes and freshens some tried-and-true Chekhovian arguments by sifting them through a Jewish strainer.

Playwright Roth's rejigging of the script, translated by Carol Rocamora, is helped along immensely by director John Vreeke, who understands that while Chekhov deliberately labeled this work a comedy, tragedy is never distant. For Roth, that essential motif is as Jewish as it is Russian, and ultimately it's what makes Seagull on 16th more than a curiosity.

The plot, as it is, revolves around the dysfunctional mother-son relationship between aging actress Arkadina (an exquisitely self-centered Naomi Jacobson) and her son, budding writer Treplev (an achingly tortured artist, Alexander Strain). The expansive cast of 11 constellates around this dueling pair. There's also Nina (Veronica del Cerro), a budding actress whose love for Treplev fades on meeting popular writer Trigorin (an understated Jerry Whiddon). And Masha (Tessa Klein), the brooding daughter of brusque estate manager Shemraev (Brian Hemmingsen) whose love for Treplev is unrequited. Arkadina's brother, Sorin (Stephen Patrick Martin), mourns for a life lived blandly. As Dorn, the family physician and one-time man-about-town, a steadfast J. Fred Shiffman seems the sanest of the bunch.

Treplev was Chekhov's mouthpiece in an early monologue, urging new forms and styles for a theater world then gone stale with heart-tugging melodramas. This new Treplev in his Jewish guise seems a Roth alter ego: His rumpled jacket, untucked shirt and his assertions about making the theater a place where spirit and community can be drawn together echo Roth's own sentiments for his version of a 21st-century urban Jewish theater.

We meet Treplev as he's putting the finishing touches on his play, a modernist rendition of the Havdalah ceremony, his white-clad Nina aglow portraying the departing Sabbath Queen. "Theater is more than stardust and time travel," he declares to his less-than-attentive onstage audience, "[it] must wake us up to our fellow man, our country, our god." Sounds like a Theater J mission statement.

Fast-talking Treplev is nearly beside himself, his creativity flowing, when Arkadina stops him in his tracks, denigrating his work and his nascent interest in Judaism. This generational divide, representing children reawakening an interest in religion that their parents or grandparents put aside, rings as true in the 19th century as it does in the 21st.

Not until Acts Three and Four does the play progress comfortably rather than fitfully. As the various couplings and uncouplings, lovers sought and rejected, play out, Seagull on 16th seems ready to alight, and yet, alas, it never soars.

So for all Roth's self-regard, his questioning on the Jewishness of the Russian soul and spirit, this Chekhov remains what it always was. Has Roth revisioned Chekhov's Russian creations as a Jewish family? Modestly so. Was the task worth the effort? Perhaps.

Or as Tolstoy, another great Russian (non-Jewish) writer noted in beginning Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Chekhov's family of characters, whether Jewish or not, is as singularly unhappy. The Seagull on 16th Street is onstage through July 19 at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center. Tickets, $30-$55, are available at 800-494-TIXS or www.boxofficetickets.com.