Uncle Vanya: Finding Humor in Wasted Lives
The Acting Studio,
through December 4
When, near the end of the play, the characters in Uncle Vanya each return from saying goodbye to old Professor Serebryakov and his young second wife, Yelena, they all utter the same resigned, ritualistic phrase: “They’re gone.” The repetition’s effect is a strange combination of tragedy and love forlorn. And humor.
Humor?
The author — Anton Chekhov — insisted that this play, subtitled Scenes From a Country Life, was a comedy. True, it is amusing to watch members of the self-absorbed, bored, ineffectual Russian aristocracy trying to make a living in an increasingly parched landscape, emotionally as well as geographically. In this new Different Stages production, director Royce Gehrels not only examines the play’s central theme — the fear of wasting lives — he also candidly captures the love and the hate, and the joy and the pain, of this family’s life.
In many stage productions of Vanya, the play’s comedic tones are overlooked. This is a mistake that Gehrels clearly doesn’t intend to make. His production revels in Chekhov’s delicate (often flat) humor and is helped enormously by a skilled cast bringing to fruition the director’s retranslation. They are confident enough to make a meal of the play’s comic subtleties, particularly Norman Blumensaadt as Vanya and Beaumont Paul as Dr. Astrov.
This emphasis, however, overlooks Chekhov’s bitter undercurrents — Anthony Hopkin’s August to Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street. Everyone, including the oppressed Vanya and his niece Sonya (Johanna Watts), looks so content and well-fed, it’s difficult to take their complaints seriously. When Vanya’s desperation reaches its breaking point, it seems to come from nowhere. Despite individually impressive performances, there is an odd lack of intimacy between the actors.
Anne C. Putnam stands out as the solid family bedrock Nannykins — such combined pathos and comfort in her delivery of the line, “The geese cackle, then they stop cackling. That’s the way it is.” The pairing of Henry V. Fitzgerald Jr., as the guitar-strumming survivor Waffles, and Robert Rudié, as Serebryakov, is almost too Abbott-and-Costello. Gay Gaughan-Hurst plays Maman with the resolute gravity becoming of a dowager.
Blumensaadt jumps into the role of Vanya, possessing a white-hot passion that is evenly divided between his desperate love for the gorgeous Yelena (Amy McAndrew) and his loathing for the man in whose service he has worked for decades, Serebryakov. The intensity is always present, and many of Blumensaadt’s scenes work magnificently — especially the ones that revolve around his worsening relationship with the professor. His flailing protestations of love for the professor’s wife, however, either to her face or behind her back, are played with such exaggeration as to strain believability.
True, the play is talky. Okay, Chekhov is talky. But beneath the playwright’s long, posturing speeches and seemingly incessant chatter, and peering out at us in the audience through the cracks of this super-saturated surface are such timeless thematic staples as amorous desire, envy, sloth, unreciprocated love, impetuous intent to murder, the obsessive work ethic, the destructive effects of alcoholism, suicide, and estrangement of every conceivable variety.
This Different Stages production of Uncle Vanya owes a great deal to Gehrels’ thoughtful translation with its accomplished contemporary feel. Behind its vernacular, Gehrels has preserved Chekhov’s universal elements: loneliness, wasted lives, romantic hope, despair.
Anyone who has ever felt that their life has been placed on hold — that they are going through motions that are irrelevant to what they truly need — will understand Uncle Vanya. In Sonya’s eloquent monologue at the end of the play, Watts is intense as she agonizingly tries to find coherence in what is left of their shattered lives. “Perhaps we can dream again,” she says.
Given all the depravity in Uncle Vanya, I can understand why the Russian Revolution got started.
This article appears in December 3 • 1999.