If you know Richard Nelson’s Apple Family plays, you didn’t have to be Kreskin to know that Uncle Vanya was in his future. Produced annually at the Public Theater from 2010 to 2013, the contemporary tetralogy set in Rhinebeck, N.Y.—That Hopey Changey Thing, Sweet and Sad, Sorry, and Regular Singing—carries the Chekhovian subtitle Scenes From Life in the Country.
Yet it’s not as if Nelson simply cribbed the title from the late-19th-century Russian dramatist. “One feels the gracing presence of Chekhov throughout these plays,” writes Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director, in “An American Saga,” a foreword to the published collected Apple plays. “Like Chekhov’s characters, the Apples are decent, highly educated, caring people who love their country, understand that something has gone terribly wrong in its politics, and have no confidence in their own ability to change it.”
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★ review here.]
Thanks to Gregory Mosher’s new Hunter Theater Project and San Diego’s Old Globe, which commissioned and produced the premiere earlier this year, we’re finally seeing what Nelson can do with Uncle Vanya (he directs and shares translation credit with Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky). The cast is stacked with Nelson veterans: Jay O. Sanders (who starred in both the Apple series and the Gabriel Family Trilogy) is the misanthropic Vanya, given to long rants about his “dried codfish” brother-in-law; Jon DeVries (another Apple alum) plays pompous professor Alexander, the aforementioned crusty cod, who’s cursed with poor health but blessed with a decades-younger wife, Elena (Celeste Arias); Jesse Pennington (Nelson’s Franny’s Way and Rodney’s Wife) is Astrov, doctor by day and conservationist by night; Yvonne Woods (Franny’s Way, Goodnight Children Everywhere) is the practical, plain-faced Sonya, who can’t help but fall prey to Astrov’s dreamy eyes and environmental odes. “You can stoke your stoves with peat and build your barns of stone. Well, all right, cut wood when you need to, but why destroy whole forests?” he asks. “Man is endowed with reason and creative power to increase what’s been given to him, but so far he’s been destroying, not creating. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife is disappearing, the climate is ruined, and with every day the earth becomes poorer and uglier.” Can you blame a girl for swooning—even if Astrov’s personal stove is stoked with a few shots of vodka? And because one unrequited love affair is never enough for Chekhov, Vanya and Astrov also have it bad for Elena (who’s a little into Astrov, though you’d never know it from Arias’ performance).
The Nelson-Pevear-Volokhonsky translation is unadorned but never dull, poetic but not pretentious. I’m no Chekhov scholar, and I won’t bore you by comparing scripts side by side, but you can rest assured that this is still, first and foremost, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. (As opposed to, say, “a version of the play by Anton Chekhov,” which Brian Friel wrote.) There’s definitely comedy in this tragicomedy—How can you not laugh at Vanya’s inability to properly aim a pistol?—but certainly not as much as in previous productions. (I’m remembering the lushly costumed, broadly played Sydney Theatre Company tour that starred Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, and Richard Roxburgh.) And it’s not as dark—figuratively or literally—as some others, such as the lamp-lit Sam Gold–directed, Annie Baker–adapted production at Soho Rep in 2012. The Nelson-directed version is intimate, sometimes whisper-quiet, and often deeply, deeply moving. (It’s also less than two hours long, thanks to some trims that include cutting the character of Waffles completely.) When Vanya eventually lashes out at—or stands up to—the professor, his speech has never been more poignant: “I’m talented, intelligent, brave…If I’d had a normal life, I could have become a Schopenhauer, a Dostoevsky!!!” Sanders never gets hysterical; all of his pain goes into his cracked voice and hunched shoulders.
And you might want to bring tissues for Sonya’s we’ll-live-and-we’ll-rest speech at the end. I’m not sure how Woods gets through that picture-imperfect description of life and death—“When our hour comes, we’ll obediently die.… We’ll hear the angels, we’ll see the sky all in diamonds”— every night without breaking down, because I certainly couldn’t.
Now the question becomes: When will the next Chekhov arrive? Nelson and Pevear and Volokhonsky have already collaborated on translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard. Is next year too soon?
Uncle Vanya opened Sept. 16, 2018, and runs through Nov. 18 at the Frederick Loewe Theater. Tickets and information: huntertheaterproject.org
