If it’s spring in New York, it’s time for an Uncle Vanya.
Last year’s was a relatively standard-issue Broadway production starring funnyman Steve Carell, with a new adaptation by Heidi Schreck. In 2023, it was an intimate, candlelit version in a private loft with an audience of only 40 each night; Tony-winning director and sometime actor David Cromer played the depressive title character.
Now, fresh off a London run, it’s Vanya; the Uncle has been nixed, along with nearly all of the cast and a chunk of the running time (it clocks in at roughly 110 minutes). Irish actor Andrew Scott—perhaps best known on this side of the pond as the Hot Priest in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s ultra-black comedy Fleabag and, more recently, as a slippery psychopath in the 2024 miniseries Ripley—is ambitiously and exhaustingly playing every one of Chekhov’s characters. The script has been given a contemporary gloss by Tony winner Simon Stephens (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), who’s credited as co-creator along with director Sam Yates and designer Rosanna Vize.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★☆ review here.]
“After Anton Chekhov” appearing on the cover and title page of the Playbill should give you an idea of the liberties that Stephens—whose extensive and varied oeuvre also includes Bluebird, Sea Wall, Punk Rock, Heisenberg, and Morning Sun, as well as adaptations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard—has taken. Most of the names have been anglicized: e.g., Mikhail Lvovich Astrov, the doctor, is Michael; Yelena Andreevna—the object of the doctor’s, and almost every man’s, affection—is Helena; estate worker Ilya Ilich Telegin is now Liam, and his cruel nickname Waffles has become the more modern Crater. (“On account of the marks on my face. I had acne when I was twelve. And not just spots. Really, really horrible acne. I think there are photos of it somewhere,” he explains.) Helena’s much-older husband, Alexander, formerly a professor/scholar, is “a generational defining filmmaker.” (“His only successful films were adaptations,” sneers Vanya. “And even they were, well…Adequate.”) Vanya’s niece, Sonia, who pines for Michael, is a little more self-deprecating (“Even the dogs know I love him… I keep telling them.”) Ivan, aka Vanya, wears sunglasses and carries a noisemaker to punctuate his lines with loopy sound effects. And he’s more attention-seeking than anything else. Does he really desire Helena? One suspects not—at least not on any deep level. “I just want you to look at me and not send me away,” he pleads to her. “That’s all I want. That’s all I need.”
Olivier Award winner Scott takes great care to assign a distinct voice and defining mannerisms to each role: Sonia carries a kitchen cloth; the housekeeper, Marina, stands at the kitchen counter, dragging on a cigarette; Helena sounds distracted and breathy, fiddling with her slinky gold necklace as she speaks. Michael is deeply serious, and for some reason likes to play with a tennis ball. All it takes for Scott to slip in and out of each character is a turn, or a walk behind a door. He’s a marvel.
It’s tempting to ask for a moratorium on Vanya—perhaps we can start over-producing Three Sisters instead? But there’s something to the Vanya-mania. In a 2024 essay in The New York Times, the playwright Jon Robin Baitz wrote this: “Although first produced in Moscow in 1899, it feels just like our present American age, when nobody hears anybody else because listening hurts too much; when the most comforting activity imaginable is a long, solitary walk followed by an even longer interlude of silence.” Truthfully, there’s no Chekhov play that feels more New York.
Vanya opened March 18, 2025, at the Lucille Lortel Theatre and runs through May 11. Tickets and information: vanyaonstage.com
