Let’s remind you that The Apple Family plays and The Gabriels plays are two series of dramas that Richard Nelson wrote and staged at the Public Theater between 2010 and 2016. Each of these cycles studies a different fictional family living in the Hudson River Valley town of Rhinebeck in our contemporary times.
The characters are educated, professional, white people—educators, bureaucrats, artists—whose lives are fraying somewhat with economic worries and the regrets and anxieties of their later middle age. All talk and relatively little action, staged in understated circumstances, these quietly lovely plays do not deliver plot-driven stories or dramatic twists, but rather offer insightful group portraits of everyday people.
Many reviewers have mentioned, and rightfully so, how these plays remind them of American variations upon Anton Chekhov’s works.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★ review here.]
It seems natural, then, that Uncle Vanya, the most intimate among Chekhov’s full-length plays, is being presented in a new adaptation by Nelson that he directs in the manner of his previous series. Produced earlier this year by The Old Globe in San Diego, the play opened tonight as a production of the Hunter Theater Project at Hunter College’s Frederick Loewe Theater , a black box that has been configured for this show as a 190-seat arena space.
When the audience enters, they will see three long wooden tables and a dozen mismatched chairs heaped at the center of the space. As in Nelson’s Apple and Gabriels staging, the actors enter to silently arrange the furniture and set out china and glasses to suggest a kitchen where the play shortly will unfold.
Translated by Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky and Nelson into conversational English, Uncle Vanya is performed without an intermission and runs slightly less than two hours. Nondescriptly dressed by Susan Hilferty and Mark Koss in modern American clothes—Henleys, cardigans, plain skirts, denims—the characters call each other by Russian names and the story retains its indeterminate Russian situation of 120 years ago. But for all emotional intents and purposes, the drama might as well be about the Serebryakov family sharing a miserable time in Rhinebeck last summer.
Jay O. Sanders, the backbone actor of the Apple and Gabriels cycles, has been perfectly cast as Vanya, a goodhearted older fellow who bitterly realizes how he has wasted his potential and misspent his life by managing the family farm. A paunchy, greying figure who resembles a declawed bear, Sanders’ Vanya seethes until he briefly erupts into a red-faced rage before quickly deflating into a resigned acceptance of his situation. Sanders instills a creepiness into Vanya’s hopeless crush on his pretty sister-in-law that is slightly unsettling to observe as he stares at Celeste Arias’ sweet-natured but none-too-sharp Elena, who is not at all a flirt.
Another stalwart of the Apple series, Jon DeVries portrays a self-absorbed, wearily irritating Serebryakov with trembling hands, a rheumy voice, and a flashing half-smile of superiority. His daughter, Sonya, earnestly depicted with a furrowed forehead by Yvonne Woods, registers as a selfless soul who probably takes after her long-gone mother.
Sporting a bushy black beard as Astrov, Jesse Pennington believably suggests the doctor’s enervated state as well as his genuine, if flickering, enthusiasm for the natural world going to waste. It’s good to see Astrov depicted here as an anxious younger man rather than as a nearly total burn-out; it underlines his attraction to both Sonya and Elena.
There are solid performances as well by Alice Cannon as Vanya’s fretful mama and Kate Kearney-Patch as the watchful old nanny. And as for Waffles, the guitar-playing hanger-on friend of the family, well, he has been eliminated from this edition of the play. His is a minor figure, true, but he lent an undefinable bit of idle charm to the story.
Nelson’s trim adaptation and quiet staging of the play underscores the timeless nature of Uncle Vanya. The artful simplicity and intimacy of his well-acted American interpretation of a Russian classic is very satisfying.
