Why is it called “Uncle Vanya”? All one does is snap, snap harder, try to do something other than wipe, fail miserably, and snap some more.
You can’t blame him. Vanya has spent most of his nearly 50 years amassing meager profits from a provincial province, not even for himself. The money he earns, running the farm with his unmarried niece, goes to support life in the city for his erratic, painful former brother-in-law, an art professor who “knows nothing about art.” Also, Vanya is hopelessly in love with the old man’s extremely clumsy young wife, who, understandably, finds the moper pathetic.
In short, he is the opposite of the brave and laudable characters most writers of the late 1890s would name a play after. Perhaps that is why Chekhov did this, announcing a new kind of protagonist for a new kind of drama. Life in his experience, having turned miserable and absurd, he could no longer paint for the audience as heroic. So how can its protagonist be a hero?
“Uncle Vanya,” which opened Wednesday at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, its 10th Broadway revival in 100 years, takes Chekhov’s epochal gamble and raises it. If Vanya is really no hero in this entertaining but rarely deeply affecting production, it is because he is no one at all. He despairs and disappears.
That would seem to be a hoax, given that he’s played by Steve Carell, star of “The Office” and, perhaps more importantly, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Carell’s Vanya imports from those appearances the over-the-top lust that makes you roll your eyes at him while worrying about his sanity. He jokes that they are not. He gets excited about all the wrong things. Is the rain coming? it CALLED that.
Without a camera trained on such a man, you quickly learn to ignore him, as you would in real life. Indeed, in Lila Neugebauer’s sleek and lucid staging, you barely notice Vanya even when he makes his first entrance, hidden behind a bench. When he speaks you don’t pay much attention; in the new version of Heidi Schreck’s quiet, loyal, but also chatty, his first words are, of course, complaints. “Ever since the professor showed up with his consort“, he says, with a bitterly sarcastic twist on the last word, “my life has been total chaos.”
It is true that the professor – who is here called Alexander instead of the Russian moron Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov – has ruined the family with his demands and pains and the unearned author. But his wife, here called Elena, has been, if possible, even more divisive.
Beauty and boredom in close proximity will do that. If Vanya is a smelly dog, she easily gets away, a local doctor, Astrov, proves the most tempting companion. He is intelligent, cynical and passionate, at first only about ecology, but soon also about Elena.
Vanya is usually the connecting point of the plot. His envy of Alexander and Astrovin, his fondling of Elena, resentment of his mother (who revels in Alexander’s every apothegm), and neglect of his granddaughter’s needs (Sonia is in love with Astrovin) all come back to haunt them. made it as a comedian. infallible boomerang. It’s no wonder that the role has been cat to big Broadway hams like Ralph Richardson, George C. Scott, Derek Jacobi and Nicol Williamson.
But Carell is no ham: He’s precise, natural, unimposing. This is a reasonable choice given the in vitro text, which reads like an anticlimactic comedy. But in vivo, on stage, it must also be a tragedy of inertia. For this you need a dominant Vanya with a raging inner life.
That there is not one here is not fatal. Neugebauer is such a detailed director, perfecting every moment and movement to an elegant polish, that this typically wonderful Lincoln Center Theater production offers a hundred things to enjoy. Mimi Lien’s sylvan set, receding into the depths of the Beaumont stage, is one. The musical interludes, by composer Andrew Bird, often with accordion and violin, are another, striking the show’s pleasant melancholy. Kaye Voyce’s contemporary costumes, quickly identifying the status and self-concept of each character, are wonderful, and in the case of Elena’s knitted dresses with their strong, sensational cuts.
And so is the woman who wears them: Anika Noni Rose. Based on her history of ingenues (“Caroline, or Change”) and sirens (“Carmen Jones”), she arrives here as the nagging question mark at the end of everyone’s thoughts. I have never seen an Elena so decisive and, at the same time, so lost.
That’s one advantage of Carell leaving the ground: the other characters have more room to come out. Of course, the play always draws attention to Elena (written for Chekhov’s future wife) and Astrov (originally played by Stanislavsky himself), because they are the only possible lovers. But here, Astrov, given great self-deprecating wit by William Jackson Harper, is more dimensional than usual, including, for once, an interest in trees that is as painful as his interest in Elena.
The supporting roles are just as vividly filled. Alfred Molina as the professor is particularly lavish casting; Academically nailing the childish self-esteem of the darlings, it’s never funnier than when it’s completely serious about its fictional importance. As Sonia, Alison Pill has clearly thought about what it means to live so long with her uncle, breathing in his grievance, not daring to appreciate her own. This makes him the only truly dignified character: the one who makes you want to cry.
Otherwise I wanted to laugh. Jayne Houdyshell creates an instantly recognizable type of Vanya’s mother: the cultured Upper West Side lady in colorful clothes who reads political magazines and is probably skeptical of the productions. Even Marina, the family’s former nanny, gets a wicked reading by Mia Katigbak. Lovingly given to the family’s foibles, she is nevertheless the needle in their hot air balloon.
If all of this works well as light comedy, Chekhov’s ideal balance may require something heavier as ballast. I don’t just mean a heavier central performance, which reliably builds to the famous attempt at violence in Act III and suffers its full consequences.
It may also be that Schreck — with the keen ear for unfettered flow she demonstrated in “What the Constitution Means to Me,” on Broadway in 2019 — has scrubbed the text too clean of specifics and formalities that might offer resistance. useful. She sets the play nowhere and at no time in particular: the villa in Finland the professor wants to buy becomes, in this version, an undesigned “beach house”; money is measured in what sounds like modern dollars, however (thank goodness) no cell phones.
These small decisions—and the big manufacturing ones, too—make sense individually. Together, they add to an enjoyable evening at the theatre. That’s not a backhanded compliment. But I have a feeling that if Chekhov heard “Uncle Vanya” described that way, well, he’d never stop wetting.
Uncle Vanya
Through June 16 at Vivian Beaumont Theatre, Manhattan; vanyabroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.