When we think of Anton Chekhov — doctor, humanist, short story writer, playwright — we don’t often think of a political fire starter. His closely observed, often delicately comic work does deal with revolutions, but the hidden and eternal ones, like the hope that turns, season by slow season, into regret. No regime or attitude has successfully claimed him. In Russia, his work was beloved under the czar; it was beloved by Stalin. And it’s beloved now.
Currently, in New York, you can see three intriguing Chekhov productions: a rollicking “Ivanov” staged by the director Michael DeFilippis with his New American Ensemble at the West End Theater, as well as versions of “The Seagull” and “Uncle Vanya” by two Russian directors — both in exile for their open opposition to Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine. All three shows discover a burning modern rage beneath that quiet watercolor steppe; the timeless Chekhov seems suddenly in tune with our hour of emergency.
DeFilippis’s beautifully modulated company, welded by a devotion to the comedy underlying the relatively rarely produced “Ivanov,” demonstrates how clowning can enliven even a tale of a man (Zachary Desmond) sunk in depression. It’s a capering, darkly gleeful show about how men break things; it’s a little dangerous, too, especially if you sit close to the front.
Ivanov is our titular dark cloud, but the show’s main force is the wrecking ball Mike Labbadia, playing his estate manager, Borkin — a misogynist and crook who manifests a boisterous masculine antagonism. As Ivanov’s passivity curdles, Borkin smashes his merry way in and out of scenes, leaving human (and set) detritus in his wake. Still, DeFilippis and Co. aren’t wreckers; they adhere to the (Paul Schmidt) translation. They refuse to tear up the play for their own purposes.
That textual reverence is certainly not the trend in Russian directing, not, at least, if we can judge from the two Muscovite directors. (Both once had opera houses at their disposal and are now mounting shows around the corner from each other in cash-strapped, downtown, nonprofit New York.)
Dmitry Krymov, son of the great Soviet-era director Anatoly Efros, was one of the established Olympians of the international stage. I’d seen his image-driven work both in Russia and in overseas festivals, but he was known here, too: The Dmitry Krymov Lab presented the thrilling (and prescient) masterpiece “Opus No. 7” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2013. Krymov spectacles are like circuses staffed by demented children — music whirls, cardboard props are torn apart, figures on stilts crash through painted surfaces. One of the most striking images from “Opus No. 7” was a huge puppet, at least 12 feet tall, of Mother Russia, stifling the composer Shostakovich against her immense, suffocating breast. (He knew.)
After leaving Russia the day after Putin’s invasion, Krymov had to begin again. He reconstituted his organization — now called Krymov Lab NYC — with American actors and an international group of designers. In the extraordinary “Uncle Vanya, scenes from country life,” which plays Off Off Broadway at La MaMa, his production designer, Emona Stoykova, gives us a blank white stage, backed by a gleaming white flat covered in a hastily scrawled scene of rural buildings. It’s a scribbled-on, paper landscape, a notebook opened to a page that invites someone, anyone, to rip it out.
Krymov’s show is not your uncle’s “Uncle Vanya.” It’s positioned from the point of view of Yelena (Shelby Flannery), the visitor to Vanya’s “country life” who upsets an unhappy family with her beauty and accidental allure. Flannery strips to her corset and pantaloons for the entire show, sitting in a chair facing the audience, as various characters approach to paw at her. (Luna Gomberg did the excellent costume design, which does too often put women in their underthings.) In a nicely repulsive moment, Yelena shakes her much commented-on hair, and dozens of dead flies drop out onto the white floor. Everything pesters her.
The cast includes the usual characters: the resentful and celibate Vanya (Zach Fike Hodges), his sorrowful niece Sonya (Natalie Battistone), their neighbor Astrov (Javier Molina) and Vanya’s unsympathetic Mama (Anya Zicer). Mama is cartoonishly padded, and it can’t be a coincidence that she so resembles that Mother Russia puppet.
The cast, though, also includes Hen (MaryKate Glenn in a giant chicken suit), who watches her last chick, the 12th of 12, get turned into stew. That surreal barnyard character is not, of course, Chekhov’s. Why is she there?
Hen introduces an image of death — unceasing, voracious, war-machine death — into a story that’s usually about frustration. Her oversize, Chagallian image also unleashes darker energies in Krymov’s production. As our main interlocutor, Flannery can be discomfitingly cool, particularly when Krymov asks her to show great emotion. But the last, incredible 10 minutes are incendiary. Vanya, shrieking with rage over being ignored in a play named after him, eventually vents his spleen on the whole company. One narcissistic loser gets angry, and bang! Men and women, Chekhov and countryside, all burn to ash.
The theater and television director Aleksandr Molochnikov was roughly half Krymov’s age when he left Russia. He turned 30 in 2022, the year he escaped to Columbia University to study film — even though he had already directed two feature films at home. Four years later, at the Public Theater, “Seagull: True Story,” written by Eli Rarey, transforms Molochnikov’s own exodus into a dark mirror of Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” Rarey’s play reflects Chekhov’s: In both, an artist tries to find “new forms,” irritating his actress mother (Zuzanna Szadkowski), though the updated version includes a new jealous parent — the censorious Russian state.
Molochnikov, with varying degrees of success, investigates Chekhov’s theme of the corrupting influence of success-in-art. “I’m a sea gull. No, that’s not right. I’m a director,” Molochnikov’s avatar, Kon (Eric Tabach), says, as he sways dizzily on a New York subway platform, having fled Russia after making an anti-Putin statement on Instagram.
As he tries to get uninterested Americans to produce his “Seagull,” Kon battles off suicidal thoughts and persistent nightmares. The hilariously intrusive Andrey Burkovskiy plays the drama’s bizarre M.C.; in one memorable vision, he becomes a grotesque reminder of Putin, shirtless, riding on a “horse” made of ensemble members. Burkovskiy, with his destabilizing chaos, reminds us that the war’s hallucinatory nightmare continues. Yet, elsewhere, and in the hands of some of the company’s less gifted actors, there’s a sickening sense that the horrors in Ukraine are drifting further and further from Kon’s, and even the production’s, self-regarding mind.
Who would have thought that Chekhov, of all people, would be the playwright addressing our terrible moment? So few of us are worrying about selling off our cherry orchards these days; I can’t remember the last time I thought about going to Moscow. But here, after a month of seeing Chekhov (and Chekhov-adjacent) pieces, I’ve realized that long, long ago he diagnosed the so-bored-we’ll-smash-the-world tenor of our times. Idleness is poison; leisure means death. Over and over, his plays put guns into the hands of men who have nothing better to do. And we all know the rule of Chekhov’s gun. Never let a fool touch it in the first place.
Helen Shaw is the chief theater critic for The Times.
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