Why can’t we ever get enough of Uncle Vanya?
What is it about Anton Chekhov’s incessantly complaining, self-pitying sad sack that makes him return anew to the theater more than any other dramatic protagonist maybe short of Hamlet, that other great melancholy inaction hero?
The question has grown more pressing in the last two years, since there have been four new revivals of “Uncle Vanya” in New York alone and another starring Hugh Bonneville that finished an acclaimed run at Shakespeare Theater in Washington earlier this month.
Last year, the playwright Jon Robin Baitz argued that the play was in vogue partly because it was a “study of post-Covid paralysis.” But “Uncle Vanya” is always in fashion. I have seen 15 different versions in the last three decades, and I have come to believe that its enduring popularity is because of its flexibility.
The old argument about whether “Uncle Vanya” — which follows a series of emotional disasters that occur on a Russian country estate run by Vanya and his niece, Sonya — is a comedy or a tragedy misses the point. There’s no one right way to perform it. I’ve seen it done funny and gloomy, cerebral and physical, small scale and broadly theatrical. What’s most remarkable about the play is how it can sustain so many different approaches and still move audiences.
Look at the actors who have played the title character in the past year. There’s a world of difference between Andrew Scott, the star of the series “Ripley,” and the comedian Steve Carell; between the defeated, passive man played by the Tony-winning theater director David Cromer and the aggressively cranky Bob Laine from the Brooklyn adaptation by the “Dimes Square” playwright Matthew Gasda.
“Uncle Vanya” is to ambitious middle-aged actors what “King Lear” is to older ones: a challenge and a mark of credibility. It’s common practice to reimagine the plays of Shakespeare, shifting them into a different place and time. Chekhov’s work can just as easily be transported from 19th-century Russia to a contemporary West Virginia or Ireland without strain. Its nimbleness has become especially apparent to me over the years. “Uncle Vanya” ages well because it changes with age.
The most unsettling moment in three decades of watching this play was during the first act of a whispery 2023 production in a downtown Manhattan loft lit by candlelight. As Vanya, Cromer, who directed two shows currently on Broadway, “Dead Outlaw” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” was bemoaning how he has wasted his life. I’d seen this speech many times, but this one hit differently. Because while he wailed about his lost years, I realized, Oh, no, I am the same age as Vanya.
I am tempted to go on a long tangent about how 47 in Russia more than a century ago was much older than it is now. But instead, a confession: The first time I met Vanya was when I was a teenager and he seemed like an extremely old and clownish bore. Now that I am his age, he comes off more sympathetic. Funny how that happens.
His obsession with lost chances, the way he transforms thwarted ambition into simmering resentments that emerge as smirking mockery, his delusion about the writer he could have been — I recognize parts of myself here. When Vanya moans, “I could have been a Dostoyevsky,” it used to seem absurd. Now I get it.
The Vanya of my mind’s eye, the face that pops to mind when he’s evoked, is Wallace Shawn, who starred in the film version, “Vanya on 42nd St.” It began with a superb cast featuring Larry Pine and Julianne Moore coming to work in street clothes, a fourth wall-busting gesture that has become fashionable if not clichéd. You see it in the Bonneville “Uncle Vanya” as well as to a lesser degree in the revival with Scott, who begins by turning on the lights, making a cup of tea and adjusting the set. In contrast to those revivals, Shawn’s Vanya had an unusual gravitas, a mature weariness and slow burn, his gripes more potent because you could tell he was holding back.
The drama critic Kenneth Tynan called Vanya one “of the least playable heroes in dramatic literature” because he is so hard to take seriously. But if we don’t take him seriously, Tynan argued, the play falls apart. It’s the kind of categorical statement that critics and scholars, not to mention artists, often make about Chekhov. My mother’s college acting teacher insisted that Vanya must be played as suffering from hemorrhoids (a conviction unsupported by the script).
But consider the miraculous work being done by Scott, playing all the roles through quick-changing physicality. He plays Vanya as a man stuck in arrested development, walking onstage in sunglasses, larking around with a plastic device that plays comic sounds like wolf whistles or a recorded laugh track. He is easy to see as ridiculous (as is this show, which includes a smoldering sex scene between a man and a door). Yet the production, powered by the charisma and Scott’s bold choices, holds together.
The plot of “Uncle Vanya” is spurred by a visit from Sonya’s father, the ex-husband of Vanya’s sister, and Yelena, his bored second wife, whose beauty distracts all the men around her.
I’ve attended the last few productions of “Uncle Vanya” with my teenage daughter, and seeing the play through her eyes clarified how Vanya need not be central to a production. The play can be relatable to young audiences and old, women as well as men. The title itself, “Uncle Vanya,” invites you to consider young Sonya’s perspective. She quietly harbored a crush on the environmentalist Doctor Astrov for six years, until finally Yelena offers to act as an intermediary to learn his true feelings for her.
People have long complained that nothing happens in “Uncle Vanya” — Tolstoy told an actor, “it doesn’t go anywhere” — but the high-stakes romantic move by Sonya and Yelena is not just a nerve-racking story line. It’s a central narrative of middle-school recess.
In a revelatory performance in a Sydney Theater production in 2012, a dancing and pratfalling Cate Blanchett proved that “Uncle Vanya” could be as lively and funny as it is morose — and made a case that Yelena was its catalytic main character.
But in the new spate of modern productions, “Uncle Vanya” seems like Sonya’s play. She has the standard pathologies of the Instagram era: hyper alert to her physical flaws; deathly insecure; and holding on to the time she overheard someone gossiping about her.
Her relationship with Vanya also underlines another element of the play: Vanya as father figure. He has rubbed off on her, and not in the best ways. Sonya can be competitive about who is more unhappy.
The most memorable performances from this play have been from actresses playing this role. In my favorite production of “Uncle Vanya” — the recent National Theater revival starring Tony Jones — Amie Lou Wood (Chelsea on the recent season of “The White Lotus) delivered a heartbreaking, lustful performance that emphasizes the line about the unattractiveness of her teeth. Melanie Field, in the Washington production, contorts her face into a grotesque mask of pain upon describing herself as “plain.”
For the recent loft production in downtown Manhattan, Marin Ireland portrayed the most fully imagined Sonya I’ve seen. She makes you feel the pain of embarrassment, but also the excitement of plotting with Yelena, the conspiratorial high of a fleeting friendship. The optimism on her face makes you see that this play is not only about people constantly annoying each other, but also trying and failing to connect.
Seeing all these different versions of “Uncle Vanya” makes clear that another reason artists and audiences keep returning to the play is it’s as full of hope (doomed as it might be) as it is of frustration. This can be hard to see, because characters are constantly describing their misery, and quite flamboyantly. After all, one well-received modern adaptation is titled “Life Sucks.”
From a certain view, Sonya and Vanya end the play in a place not unlike where they were at the start, minus a few illusions. The world presented here is bleak and unforgiving in ways that will be altogether familiar to an audience today, in ways that are personal, social and even environmental.
Sonya’s resilient final speech — “What can we do? We must live our lives.” — offers a narrow path forward, in work and the afterlife. But one doesn’t need either to find solace in this famous last vignette. Vanya and Sonia have each other. In almost all the versions, she seems to keep going because of him. Sonia’s last line, spoken next to Vanya, is imagining a better future: “We shall rest.” The key word is “we.”
It’s worth recalling that the first time Chekhov tried this play, it was called “The Wood Demon,” and he had the Vanya character kill himself. (It flopped.) When he reworked it, he let him live. Vanya made some moves toward killing himself, like stealing a bottle of morphine, but Sonia found him out and forced him to give it back.
It’s one of the most important edits in the history of theater. Dying by suicide would not only have been darker (there goes the debate about comedy versus tragedy), but also less open to interpretation. Death is nothing if not conclusive. This play is about something more understandable to the living: failure.
Vanya tries and fails to get the girl, the career and the revenge he craves. He’s so ineffectual that he can’t even kill himself. It’s pathetic and wonderful, depending how you look at it.
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
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