As Vanya, Steve Carell, who’s been a low-level whiner for the first two Acts, suddenly gets so angry at his pompous-ass brother-in-law who’s been sponging off him for thirty years, that he pounces on top of the dinner table and slides the length of it on all fours. Well, I thought, that’s different.
It was a rare moment of brash movement in the more usually sedate “Uncle Vanya” opening tonight at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, with a new translation by Heidi Schreck and a starry cast including Carell making his Broadway debut. This quirky moment, a departure from the more decorous Chekhovian norm, somehow provoked a question I’ve long had about productions of Chekhov’s play: Why is it that such a well-etched portrait of a group of Russians in a 19th century country estate who each suffer in separate ways is so riveting to read, yet when staged often difficult to sit through — slow, stilted, lugubrious?
More than a century after “Uncle Vanya” was first directed by Konstantin Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theater in 1899, more and more American playwrights such as Schreck (best-known for “What The Constitution Means to Me”) seem to be taking it on. Over the last few years, I’ve seen “Uncle Vanya” translated by Annie Baker, Richard Nelson. Neil LaBute, even a New Saloon’s production that used six English translations simultaneously, ranging from Marian Fell’s (the first, which was published in the United States in 1912) to Google Translate. I’ve experienced so many Uncle Vanyas that the only one that truly stands out in my memory is the one by the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which is, in its entirety:
“Are you Uncle Vanya?”
“I am.”
[Gunshot sounds]
“Ouch!”
— and that’s an undeniably bad translation. For one thing, all the characters actually already know one another.
The Lincoln Center “Uncle Vanya,” which is the 11th production of the play on Broadway, doesn’t completely solve the central difficulties of staging it. The production still requires patience; there’s no concession to the Tik-Tok generation. And while Schreck’s translation does bring out the humor, and gets rid of the stuffiness, it introduces potential problems of its own. Still, under Lila Neugebauer’s direction, the performances of the nine-member cast do click often enough to reward those of us who are patient.
Although he is the title character, Vanya feels on the periphery of life. Before his third-act table pouncing, Carell doesn’t need to stretch much as an actor to portray the mild-mannered middle-aged man who quietly stews about wasting the last 25 years of his life. Vanya spent this time largely in service to his brother-in-law (Alexander in the program, referred to as the Professor.) The Professor’s first wife, now deceased, was Vanya’s sister, and Vanya has been looking after her country estate, and sending her widower money, so that the Professor could live in the city. Vanya once thought the Professor a great man; now he thinks him a fraud, and resents his inexplicable attractiveness to beautiful women. His resentment and envy of the professor may help fuel his obsession with the Professor’s second wife, Elena – and he’s not the only one obsessed.
Both Alfred Molina as the Professor and Anika Noni Rose as Elena are exemplary in their roles. Molina is spot-on in recreating the character’s oblivious self-regard — the one character for whom impossibly pompous language is not only permissible, it’s required. Rose is able to make palpable the reasons why both Vanya and the local physician Dr. Astrov are obsessed with her – she manifests an inner grace and an outer beauty (aided by Kaye Voyce’s glamorous costumes for her.)
As Sonia, the Professor’s daughter from his first marriage (and Vanya’s niece), Alison Pill achieves the opposite challenge, to make herself seem simple and homely. She is the peacemaker in the group, who harbors an unrequited obsession for Dr. Astrov that is far more modest than Astrov’s for Elena. Pill has some of the most intense moments in the play.
William Jackson Harper portrays Dr. Astrov, who moved to this rural area to practice medicine eleven years earlier.
“Have I changed much?” he asks Marina, Sonia’s long-time nanny (Mia Katigbak, a fixture of New York theater who is making her long-overdue Broadway debut.)
“So much,” Marina replies. “You were young and handsome then and now you’re old. Not as handsome. And I have to say, you do like your booze.”
“Of course I got old!” he replies. “Life out here…it’s stupid, boring, dirty…it chews you up. We’re surrounded by freaks. Nothing but freaks. Spend a few years out here and, little by little, you turn into a freak yourself. Look, a huge mustache has sprouted up on my face—what a stupid mustache! I’ve turned into a freak.”
This exchange is funnier because Katigbak’s stoneface delivery enhances Marina’s blunt candor. Harper taps into the humor of Astrov’s exaggerated misery. The comedy is aided by Schreck’s translation. Marina’s comment about Astrov’s alcoholism is usually translated as “You drink, too” rather than “And I have to say, you do like your booze.” Usually Astrov complains that he has become “silly” like the people who surround him. (Annie Baker’s translation used the word “creep.”) I guess freak sounds funnier.
But some theatergoers might stumble over slang like “freak” and “booze,” and what it says about where and when the characters exist. They are clearly not in 19th century Russia. There’s not a samovar in sight. The characters wear casual clothes that could have come from the Gap. On the other hand, there are no telephones, much less smart phones, and, in one of his rants, Vanya exclaims: “I wasted my life. I’m talented, smart, brave… I could have been a—a Schopenhauer, or a Dostoevsky.” These are the names in Chekhov’s original, but would these two nineteenth century European figures be the first out of the mouth of an aspiring would be intellectual in 21st century New York? There are also some things built into the play that are hard to pinpoint — perhaps the characters’ particular melancholic tone and the pace of life — that seem inextricable to Chekhov’s time and place, and don’t completely jibe with modern American life.
So, we seem to exist in Theaterland, neither fully in Chekhov’s world nor in our own. The production is clearly detached from the specific cultural and historical context in which Anton Chekhov wrote it. There is a nagging feeling this detachment comes at the play’s expense.
Schreck et al would argue – and implicitly do in their production – that Chekhov’s understanding of human nature and society was universal — that our own lives, and our own society, are sufficient context to connect to “Uncle Vanya.” And that that’s why there have been so many of them.
Uncle Vanya
Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater through June 16
Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes, including one intermission
Tickets: $104 – $348
Written by Anton Chekhov, “a new version” by Heidi Schreck
Directed by Lila Neugebauer
Sets by Mimi Lien, costumes by Kaye Voyce, lighting by Lap Chi Chu and Elizabeth Harper, sound by Mikhail Fiksel and Beth Lake. Charles M. Turner III is stage manager.
Cast: Steve Carell as Vanya, Jonathan Hadary as Waffles, William Jackson Harper as Astrov, Jayne Houdyshell as Maria, Spencer Donovan Jones as Neighbor, Mia Katigbak as Marina, Alfred Molina as Alexander, Alison Pill as Sonia, and Anika Noni Rose as Elena
Photos by Marc J. Franklin
