The New York Times

Review: Listening to ‘Uncle Vanya’ With Virgin Ears (NYT Critic’s Pick)

by Ben Brantley on September 16, 2018

When did you acquire this new set of ears? You’re watching a play you thought you knew better than you know your best friend, and yet suddenly it sounds different. It’s clearer, truer and more comprehensible than it’s ever been before, as if it had always been operating on a frequency that you’ve only now been given access to.

Such experiences happen seldom to even the most devoted theatergoers. Which is why I’m still shivery, teary-eyed and stunned from seeing Richard Nelson’s devastatingly intimate production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” which opened on Sunday night at the Frederick Loewe Theater at Hunter College.

I’ve attended at least a dozen versions of “Uncle Vanya: Scenes From Country Life in Four Acts” (to use its full, deceptively straightforward title), performed by the some of the starriest casts ever assembled in the name of Chekhov. A few of them — most recently, one from the Sydney Theater Company, with Cate Blanchett — were thrilling.

But none felt as immediately personal or as emotionally coherent as this Hunter Theater Project production, which features Jay O. Sanders in the title role, giving a career-high performance. Directed by Mr. Nelson — from his limpid, streamlined (105-minute) adaptation with the veteran translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky — this is as naked and fully human an “Uncle Vanya” as we’re likely to see.

Mr. Nelson’s impeccably balanced ensemble doesn’t seem to be so much interpreting the script as living it. There’s very little Acting, with a capital A, which means few of the flamboyant displays of the eccentricities for which Chekhov’s characters are famed. These are performances that dare to be as ordinary — “trite” is a much-used word — as the people they are portraying fear they are. Each one is as humdrum, and specifically individual, as you or I.

Everything has the shimmer of unmediated transparency, as if the performers were conduits for thought made visible. This is surely the most willfully modest “Uncle Vanya” on record, and it speaks, for the most part, in a self-effacing murmur, which invites you to lean in and eavesdrop.

You not only want to listen to what’s being said; you also feel it’s somehow a moral imperative. After all, those unhappy, unfulfilled inhabitants of an isolated estate in 19th-century Russia must be heard and understood by someone, anyone. And it’s not a service they’re about to provide for one another.

As both playwright and director, Mr. Nelson has made a highly refined art of drama as privileged eavesdropping. It’s an effect he has achieved most memorably in his two multipart cycles, “The Apple Family Plays” and “The Gabriels,” in which family members discussed the state of their lives and their nation in real time.

For “Uncle Vanya,” Mr. Nelson uses two actors who originated parts in those earlier works, Mr. Sanders and Jon DeVries. He also employs a similar mise-en-scène. The set by Jason Ardizzone-West (who worked on “The Gabriels” at the Public), lighted by the great Jennifer Tipton, again consists principally of simple tables and chairs, which are first seen clumped together, like furniture in storage.

The cast members file on in contemporary work clothes (Susan Hilferty and Mark Koss did the costumes), to arrange these discrete pieces, accessorizing them with dishes and foodstuffs. As in the Apple and Gabriel plays, food is an anchor, grounding abstract and fanciful talk in the reality of subsistence.

The performers are creating the environment for the lives to be lived here, which makes the characters feel quite literally like the architects of their own destinies. Not that this is how they regard themselves.

Not Vanya, the steward of his late sister’s estate (played with defiant, abject rawness by a brilliant Mr. Sanders); or his niece and fellow manager, Sonya (Yvonne Woods, pinched with care); or her imperious father, Alexander Serebryakov (an elegant, fatuous Mr. DeVries), an aging professor in residence with his new, beautiful young wife, Elena (Celeste Arias, giving a traditionally glamorous part a homespun naïveté).

These people — who are visited by a dashing, but increasingly weary country doctor, Mikhail Astrov (a quietly sexy and damningly perceptive Jesse Pennington) — tend to speak of themselves as helpless, passive beings, pushed into place by circumstance and more extreme personalities. Don’t believe them.

What emerges so clearly here — as they snipe, quarrel, make up and haplessly pursue love affairs that are never going to happen — is that they’ve all made their own beds, for reasons of convenience or for quixotic ideals that don’t look so fine anymore. (On the other hand, Astrov’s worries about the forests his country is destroying sound newly relevant.)

They may all see themselves as misfits, to use a word that Mr. Nelson has said was central to his approach to this adaptation. But feeling like a misfit turns out to make no one special; it is the universal human condition.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/16/theater/review-uncle-vanya-richard-nelson.html

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