It's His Niece Sonya Who Stands Out in this Very Intimate Production of "Uncle Vanya"

Like most theater obsessives, I take pride in my collection of experiences that give me bragging rights—I saw Hamilton at the Public before it was a hit! I saw Glory Days, which opened and closed on Broadway the same night! I was at the Lincoln Center performance when Patti LuPone reached out and grabbed an audience member’s cell phone!—and I’m always on the lookout for more. Which is why my theatergoing buddy Bill and I ended up in a second-floor loft in the Flatiron District along with just 38 other audience members watching a very intimate production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

It was the cast that drew us there. Actors love Chekhov plays because they teeter on the line between comedy and tragedy and even those in the smaller roles get some moments to show off how they can navigate both. This time out, the director David Cromer steps into the title role of the poor relation who has devoted his life to maintaining the family property so that his brother-in-law, a vain professor, can afford to high-life it in Moscow. But also in the cast are the heavy hitters Marin Ireland as Vanya’s niece Sonya, Bill Irwin as the professor Serebryakov and Will Brill as Astrov, the despairing doctor who drinks too much and visits often.

This is the fifth major production of Uncle Vanya I’ve seen and each has used a different translation of the play, often adapted by a contemporary playwright (Annie Baker, Richard Nelson, Jean-Claude van Itallie) but this one uses the translation done back in the ‘90s by the playwright and Russian language scholar Paul Schmidt. I’m no Chekhov expert but it seemed to me to be different from the others I’ve seen in that the focus is less on Vanya and his disappointments and more on the romantic triangle involving Astrov, Sonya and the professor’s much younger second wife Yelena.

But that changing dynamic could also reflect the performances and the modern-clothes staging by director Jack Serio (click here to read more about him). Cromer has acted on both stage and screen and it seems that playing Vanya has been a longtime dream of his but he’s made his name—and won a slew of honors—as a director and it can’t have been easy for a 27-year-old newcomer like Serio to direct one of the best stage directors working today. The result is that, at least for me, Cromer’s portrayal of Vanya lacks the animating layers of resentment, ridiculousness and, finally, resignation that I've seen others bring to the role. 

Instead, Cromer’s Vanya comes across as just a supporting player in his own story. I suppose that's a valid choice since the others in his family see Vanya that way. But both the comedy and the tragedy here is that the character no longer wants to be a supporting player and is struggling to break out of that role by denouncing the professor as a selfish fraud and declaring his own futile love for Yelena. Cromer evokes that desperation but not vividly enough for me to ache for him as I’ve done for other Vanyas.  

Sonya’s story arc is similar to his. But in Ireland’s hands the emotional payoff is different. Sonya too has been left in the country to toil alongside her uncle while her widowed father is off in the city and finding a new wife. The only hope Sonya has for her own happiness is that Astrov might return a bit of the unabashed love she has for him. But Astrov also loves Yelena, who is beautifully played by Julia Chan, a newcomer to me who totally captures the elusive quality that makes everyone so enchanted with Yelena. 

Ireland digs deep into Sonya’s disappointment and her awareness that she will never be able to compete with someone like Yelena. And she makes that all so poignantly resonant that you’d be excused for thinking that the play should have been called “Sonya.” I’d urge you to see her marvelous work in this production, whose brief run ends July 16, but tickets sold out within 24-hours of going on sale. So yep, I’m bragging again.

An "Uncle Vanya" That's Truly Stuck in a Rut

Just like the rest of us, theater makers can fall into ruts and end up doing the same thing over and over. That's what happened to John Doyle who repeated his conceit of having actors play their own instruments in the musicals he directed until the idea went from sublime (for some people, albeit never for me) to tiresome.  

It's also happened to playwright Richard Nelson, whose go-to is putting a group of actors around a table where they eat some real food and whine about the unfairness of life. That's what Nelson, who likes to direct his own work, did with the cycle of Apple Family plays that ran at the Public Theater between 2010 and 2013 and The Gabriels trilogy, which played there in 2016. And now he's doing it with a new adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya that opened this week at the Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College.

Some people loved the extreme naturalism of Nelson's family plays but I bailed on the Apples midway through their saga and passed entirely on the Gabriels. I can't say I'm all that happy with Nelson's treatment of Chekhov's clan either. Although I can see what probably drew him to them (click here to read about his adaptation process).

Like most of Chekhov's plays, Uncle Vanya is set on a country estate where a group of aristocrats, their relatives, retainers and other hangers-on sit around and bemoan their lives. In this case, the place is owned by Alexander Serebryakov, a retired art professor who has lived for years in the city but has returned to the rural estate he inherited from his long-deceased first wife with his much younger new wife Elena.

Managing the estate while the professor has been away have been Sonya, his grown daughter by his first marriage, and Vanya, his middle-aged former brother-in-law. Their most frequent guest has been Astrov, the perpetually disgruntled local doctor on whom Sonya has a not-so-secret crush.

Conflicts arise when both Astrov and Vanya fall for Elena and, separately, when Alexander decides to sell the estate so that he can afford to move back to the more exciting life of the city even though such a sale will upend the lives of Sonya and Vanya.

But, as with so much of Chekhov, the true drama occurs in the subtext, in the silences between the lines and on the faces of the actors playing the roles. And so the problems with this production began for me with the idea to stage the play in the round, which meant that I often couldn't see the expressions on the actors' faces because they were turned away from me even though I was sitting in good seats that had been reserved for critics.

It also doesn't help that Nelson has the actors speak without any attempt to project their voices. This, like the decision to outfit them in contemporary leisurewear, is in keeping with his low-key aesthetic but it struck me as a stage version of Mumblecore, those indie films that are so hell-bent on being natural that they often forget to be dramatic—or entertaining. 

Jesse Pennington's apathetic spin on Astrov encapsulates that aesthetic but it was particularly off-putting to me because it conveyed little of the self-flagellating contempt with which the character views himself—and that makes him catnip to the women around him.

The one bright spot is Jay O. Sanders' sympathetic portrayal of Vanya. The burly actor was a mainstay of both the Apple and Gabriels plays and seems to have figured out how to be faithful to his director's understated approach without sacrificing the heightened emotion called for when Vanya realizes the futility of both the dreams he has nurtured and the sacrifices he's made.  

This Vanya is the debut production of the Hunter Theater Project, a new initiative designed to make theater more accessible and affordable. By cutting some scenes and a couple of characters, Nelson and his co-translators have brought the play down to under two intermissionless hours. And tickets are just $37 for general admission and $15 for students.

Still if, by chance, you've never seen Uncle Vanya this isn't the one you should begin with. And you probably won't have to wait long before another production comes along because artistic directors can get in ruts too. This is the fourth major production of the play I've seen in just the past nine years.

Memory-Making Visits to Two "Uncle Vanyas"

 

Actors and directors love to do classic works.  It gives them a chance to size themselves up against the myths and memories of earlier, legendary performances and productions.  And those of us who are theater junkies love to see them do it. That gives us the chance to look anew at these works that define the theatrical canon and, perhaps, to witness some history in the making. 

This explains how I ended up seeing two versions of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya within just the last four weeks.

The first was the Soho Rep production, directed by the ubiquitous Sam Gold from a new adaptation by his frequent collaborator playwright Annie Baker and starring a treasure chest of New York’s best stage actors.  It was scheduled to run for a month and close on July 15, but has proven such a must-see that it’s now been extended through Aug. 26.

The second production is the Sydney Theatre Company’s, helmed by the Hungarian director Tamás Ascher, who is considered one of the world’s reigning Chekhov interpreters, from an adaptation by the company’s co-artistic director Andrew Upton and starring Upton’s wife and co-artistic director, the Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett. Its brief run at City Center as part of this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival ends this weekend (click here to read about the evolution of their production).

The New York Times’ Ben Brantley so loved the Ascher-Upton-Blanchett version when it played at the Kennedy Center last year (it gets “under your skin like no other I have seen,” he wrote; click here to read the whole review) that despite the disappointing experience I’d had the last time I saw Uncle Vanya (click here to read that review) my theatergoing buddy Bill and I bought tickets as soon as they went on sale.

But just a few weeks later, I read that Soho Rep was planning to do the play and I couldn’t resist seeing what three of my very favorite showmakers—Gold, Baker and the inestimable Reed Birney as the disillusioned Vanya—would do with it and so Bill and I bought tickets for that one as well.

And I’m glad we took the double dip because the companies have taken radically different approaches to the play. And both are worth seeing.

Gold and Baker’s is almost aggressively contemporary and emphasizes the melancholy of this play about a group of interrelated and unhappy people whom economic circumstances have forced to share a Russian country house (click here to read about the thinking behind their version).

Baker, who is credited with the costuming, has dressed the actors in the kind of casual street clothes they might have worn in the rehearsal room. Andrew Lieberman’s set looks like thrift-shop cast-offs and Mark Barton’s lighting design leans heavily on the on-set lamps that stagehands and the actors plug in to signal the start of each act.

It’s a determinedly no-frills take on the play that reminded me of David Cromer’s revelatory modern-dress version of Our Town and the new no-set, no-props Cock: in all three cases, the viewer is forced to focus on the play because there’s not much else there but the play.

This stripped-down aesthetic extends to the seating for the Soho Vanya. The inside of the theater has been arranged so that there are no real seats. Instead, the audience sits on carpet-covered platforms that surround the playing area. It creates an intimate space in which to see the play but unless you’re in the first row there’s no where to put your legs.

Most people, except for the occasional women unlucky enough to be wearing a skirt, sat yoga style at our performance.  But, as my numbed knees will attest, it’s not the most comfortable way to see a play.

So it’s a testament to the production that I was not only riveted by it, but moved as well. Although Baker’s language is decidedly modern, the play’s themes of unrequited love and missed opportunities are timeless. And the actors she and Gold have assembled are fearless in exploring them.

Birney is unsurprisingly excellent as Vanya but the spotlight may have been stolen by Michael Shannon, who brings an edgy, idiosyncratic charm to the role of Astrov, the doctor who falls in love with Yelena, the restless wife of the much-older professor who is his patient. 

Meanwhile Merritt Wever, best known as the cheery junior nurse on TV’s “Nurse Jackie,” is wrenching as Sonya, Vanya’s self-effacing niece who is helplessly in love with the doctor and who gives the play’s famous final speech which, in this production, becomes an elegy for all those who lead lives of quiet desperation.

There is more comedy in the equally conversational adaptation that Uptown has written for the Sydney Company.  And it’s a fancier production. He and Ascher have updated the time period from Czarist Russia at the turn of the last century to the Soviet Union at midcentury. 

Ascher’s longtime collaborator Zsolt Khell has designed an elegant dacha that is just rundown enough to suggest the economic hardships that all but the highest members of the Communist Party endured during that period.  

And costume designer Györgi Szakács has underscored the class differences in this supposedly classless society by incorporating touches of peasant wear into the outfits of the characters who live in the country, while dressing the professor and Yelena, who have recently arrived from Moscow, in sleeker, more fashionable outfits.

Blanchett, long a favorite of fashion magazine editors, looks fabulous in these clothes. And, of course, she acts fabulously too. Chekhov is prized by actors because he wrote roles that allow them to show off both their dramatic and comedic talents, often within the same scene. Summoning her considerable skills, Blanchett makes Yelena simultaneously spoiled and unfulfilled, slapstick silly and achingly sad. 

She is well matched by Richard Roxburgh who plays the hapless Vanya (although I found Roxburgh to be so endearing that it was hard to understand why Yelena wouldn’t respond to him) and by Hugo Weaving, familiar to fans of “The Matrix” and “Lord of the Rings” movie trilogies, who plays an equally alluring Astrov. 

They and their colleagues have created a stylish and intelligent production.  And yet, it didn’t move me in the way that the one at Soho Rep did. Bill, on the other hand, felt exactly the opposite way.  He admired the work the Soho Rep company did but was transported by the Sydney crew, even though the acoustics in City Center made it difficult to hear everything those actors said.

That, of course, is the magic of great theater.  And it is the reason those of us who love theater grab at the chance to see great works, particularly when presented by artists of this caliber, over and over again.

"Uncle Vanya" is Unfocused

“Do your own thing” was a major mantra back when I was in college. Now, the sentiment seems to have been revived in the Classic Stage Company’s new production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Because everyone involved—from the actors to the designers—seems to be following his or her individual bliss. You might have thought director Austin Pendleton, an old-hand at Chekhov as both an actor and a director, would have kept everyone marching in the same direction but like an indulgent parent, he has let them all go their own way. And the result is a production that is all over the place.

This show has gotten a lot of attention for two reasons. One: it comes in the middle of a coincidental Chekhov festival, with the appearances of The Seagull on Broadway last fall, The Cherry Orchard at BAM now and the upcoming Three Sisters from the Classical Theatre of Harlem opening later this month. Two: it has a starry cast lead by the real-life couple Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard (whom one critic has called our local Brangelina) as, respectively, Yelena, a bored trophy wife, and Astrov, the environmentally-conscious doctor who loves her; Tony-winner Dennis O’Hare (who’s recently gotten lots of big screen time playing villains in the movies "Milk" and "Changeling") in the title role; and Mamie Gummer (whose mother is Meryl Streep) as the plain-Jane niece Sofya.

Only Gummer worked for me. She gives her character a gawky poignancy that seems most in keeping with Chekhov’s theme of repressed and thwarted dreams. Yelena is supposed to express her disillusionment through a restless ennui but Gyllenhaal is so languid that my attention kept wandering to the details of the beautiful period costumes Suzy Benzinger has designed for her. And I didn’t like Sarsgaard any more in this than I liked him as Trigorin in The Seagull. I’m a big fan of Sarsgaard’s movie work and I’m all for actors stretching and taking roles outside their comfort zone but try as he might, Sarsgaard seems as at ease in Chekhov as a skinny kid in a superhero’s suit.

But it was O’Hare who drove me up a wall. He has said that Uncle Vanya is his first professional production of Chekhov and he plays the title character as though he were the dacha’s resident smart ass—willing to do anything, including literally chewing the scenery, to get a laugh. This might have worked if Pendleton had decided to give the entire production a similar contemporary sensibility; instead O’Hare seems to have time-traveled in from a Judd Apatow flick.

The design team appears to have had just as difficult a time deciding what to make of the production. The talented set designer Santo Loquasto has created a beautifully atmospheric two-story house. But the actors seldom use the upper level and it’s hard to see what’s happening when they move to the back of the large set. If you’re sitting in the seats on either side of the three-sided stage, it’s a challenge to see anything since supporting beams block so many sight lines. And because the actors vary so radically in the way they deliver their lines, sound designer Daniel Baker apparently has had a tough time figuring out how to amplify them so that you can hear everything that’s being said.

After the show, my friend Ellie and I left CSC’s 13th Street theater in search of a drink but the neighborhood bars that Ellie likes were closed or so crowded that we ended up walking over to the West Village where we found seats at the bar of Mario Batali’s Otto and treated ourselves to drinks and a couple of plates of his delicious and surprisingly affordable antipasti. On the way there, Ellie, a former actress and a longtime Chekhov lover, asked me what I’d liked about the production. “Nothing,” I snapped and then changed the subject. My response was an overstatement. But, alas, not by much.