Director Lila Neugebauer sets Lincoln Center Theater’s starry, breathtaking new Broadway production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” in current-day America rather than Russia around 1898, the year the play was written. There’s a baseball cap and a backpack with dayglow tape; pills are in plastic bottles with childproof caps; when someone runs out of ink while paying bills, they look for a new pen. What a difference 126 years can make!
And yet, judging by the state of the world and the human psyche depicted in Chekhov’s play, nothing at all has changed — man was destroying the planet then and still is, women were fighting for equal rights and still are, the artist class couldn’t afford to live in the city and still can’t, and when thoughtful older folks look back, they still feel deep regret for having wasted their precious lives with meaningless work and convictions full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Their bitterness is so relentless it makes the approaching end seem like a mercy.
“Uncle Vanya” is a very dark play. And yet, under Neugebauer’s direction — and played by a cast featuring Steve Carell, William Jackson Harper, Anika Noni Rose, Alfred Molina and Alison Pill — every moment of this production shimmers with beauty, mirth, and, at least for the audience, hope. Despite the terrible state of things, art is still able to lift us up, take us out of our misery, and move us.
As for the plot, a group of smart, interesting people, mostly family, have been living on a working farm for many years. The farm is owned by young Sonia (Pill), who works it, very happily, with her middle-aged uncle, Vanya (Carell). Her late mother — Vanya’s sister — owned the farm originally, which is why Vanya lives there with his own mother, Sonia’s feminist grandmother (Jayne Houdyshell); Sonia’s godfather (Jonathan Hadary); and her nanny (Mia Katigbak), who takes care of the meals and the house.
Sonia’s in love with a neighbor, Astrov (Harper), around her age, who’s been coming by once a month for years and sometimes paints while Sonia and Vanya do paperwork, because he says it’s so “warm there, and comfy,” and he likes the sound of “pens scratching and crickets chirping.” So it’s been a pretty nice life for all of them.
That is, until a month ago, when Sonia’s father, the famous art writer Alexander (Molina), arrived from the city with his beautiful young wife, Yelena (Rose). That distraction — the self-involved, old egotist and the beautiful young woman — has destroyed the peace of the house, driving the original members of the community pretty much crazy and rendering them useless. Vanya hates Alexander and lusts after Yelena; Astrov loves Yelena and comes to the house every day to be around her, fanning the flames of Sonia’s love for him. Yelena’s in love with Astrov, too, because he’s great: He’s a doctor, and in his spare time he plants trees on his land, fighting the good fight against deforestation. No one can sleep, everyone’s drinking too much, bills are piling up, and the triggers are coming so fast and furious that violence seems inevitable.
All of these characters and their various feelings about each other are understandable. Who isn’t wildly attracted to beauty and hasn’t behaved badly to be near it? Who doesn’t dislike selfish, self-involved old men? Who hasn’t felt they were wasting their time doing pointless tasks for stupid people? Who wouldn’t love a guy who’d spent his time and energy trying to keep trees alive?
Well, this play could, in fact, be a stiff, empty, misanthropic soap opera in lesser hands. But with Heidi Schreck’s gorgeous, colloquial translation, and a flawless, fully engaged ensemble cast, the play is as entertaining as it is heartbreaking and profound.
Carell gets top billing, but he doesn’t strut his stuff the way many stars would, instead fitting seamlessly into this fascinating family. His character is a good, funny man who hasn’t lived the life he imagined he would and, for a moment, finds someone to blame. Who can’t relate to that?
And Harper, as the healer Astrov, who drinks too much to keep his self-hatred at bay, is utterly delightful. It feels like these actors — along with Molina, Pill and Rose — have been rehearsing for months, they’re so comfortable in their roles, and make their characters and their suffering so deeply relatable.
The icing on the cake here is Mimi Lien’s set design, Lap Chi Chu and Elizabeth Harper’s lighting, and even Mikhail Fiksel and Beth Lake’s sound, which create a sense of glistening, wide-open space, as if all this action were occurring in a kind of heavenly place. It makes the characters’ existences seem special — almost celestial — and their grievances petty, yes, but also part of the beauty and sublimity of this momentary life.
This is the brilliance of this play as rendered by Schreck, Neugebauer, and the entire cast: It shows us that while we have no choice but to go on, despite the frightening state of the world and our own inevitable demise, we could, if we took the hint, recognize how lucky we are.