T. Charles Erickson Photo
Samuel Douglas as Uncle Vanya and Rebeca Robles as Sonya.
The David Geffen School of Drama at Yale’s production of Anton Chekhov’s masterpiece Uncle Vanya — running now at the Iseman Theater on Chapel St. through Dec. 15 — is played before the theater’s usual stadium seating, but the viewers positioned on risers in the wings of the stage will feel themselves more pointedly in the midst of the action. The play, directed by fourth-year directing MFA candidate Sammy Zeisel, was adapted by the much-awarded playwright Annie Baker and experimental director Sam Gold to be staged, at Soho Rep in 2012, with a “you are there in the midst of the action” arrangement, where some spectators sat on the floor or makeshift seats, and the cast was surrounded by the audience.
Action? In Chekhov? While Chekhov’s dramas tend to lots of talk, played out over periods of intense socializing, Zeisel and his youthful cast inject the proceeding with plenty of movement and upward flinging of hands. It’s a much more boisterous play than you may have experienced before, and the Russian aura — which generally translates into angst and ennui — is tempered by costumes (Arthur Wilson) that could be worn, for the most part, on the streets of any U.S. city today. Working from a literal translation of Chekhov’s Russian text by Margarita Shalina, Baker’s version pitches the play directly at contemporary audiences who might feel that the concerns of the pastoral 19th century Russian countryside among landowners, scholars, doctors, and the peasants who serve them are a bit remote.
In the Yale production, part of the vitality is due to the fact that all the players are current MFA candidates (but for Leo Egger, a Yale undergrad in a minor part) and so well below the ages of the characters they play. The only youthful characters are the story’s two main female roles: Sonya (Rebeca Robles), the niece of the titular Vanya (Samuel Douglas), and Yelena (Karen Killeen), the much younger woman whom Sonya’s father, Alexander Serebryakov (Kamal Sehrawy), a retired professor, married after the death of his first wife, Vanya’s sister. Other characters include Sonya’s old nanny, Marina (Anna Roman), Telegin (Edoardo Benzoni), an impoverished neighbor who lives on the estate, the local doctor Astrov (Lucas Iverson) who is a longstanding friend of the family, and Maria Voinitskaya, Vanya’s intellectual maman, who idolizes Alexander.
The two main male characters, Vanya and Astrov, undergo what we tend to think of today as midlife crises. They’re both fascinated by Yelena’s beauty and plunged into idleness as they dote upon her. Sonya, an earnest young girl who is deemed “not pretty,” meanwhile pines for Astrov, and before the play’s over even Yelena will admit to feelings for him. For Chekhov, the main focus is the rivalry and dissatisfactions amongst Alexander, who is married to Yelena but doesn’t deserve her (in Vanya’s view), Vanya, who once worshipped the professor as a great intellectual but now takes him to task every chance he gets, and Astrov, a visionary committed to replenishing the depleted natural resources of the countryside, who gets sidetracked when smitten by Yelena. In Baker’s version — and particularly with this young cast — the focus is more readily placed on the two women, Sonya and Yelena, so that their reconciliation scene plays like a giddy sleepover in which both finally let down their guards and confidences are shared with much flinging about on the floor. We might almost feel that both or either could emerge as the play’s main character, even though Yelena speaks of herself disparagingly as a “minor character in a play.”
It’s a revealing comment because it helps to underscore what makes Chekhov plays so worth staging and watching today. Who we sympathize with most will change from scene to scene, as with people we get to know over time in real life. The notion that an important character in this little world — Yelena being a primary catalyst — is, in the larger world, not much of anything at all helps to put the Chekhovian world into perspective. Vanya’s conviction that Alexander’s achievements — other than his luck in his wives — don’t merit much regard lets in the cold, hard light of reality to this family. Another harsh reality, as laid out to Yelena largely to her indifference by Astrov, is that the customs of the country have laid waste to forests and driven off or destroyed wild birds and elk, while not achieving any innovations that would count as modern conveniences. It’s a backward, destructive world Astrov sees and only Sonya seems capable of understanding the challenge that he would like to take up on behalf of humanity. A third harsh reality is that Alexander can’t stand living in the country and can’t afford to live in the city on what the estate brings in; his plan to sell it and invest ultimately drives Vanya frantic.
Unlike many another Chekhov character, Astrov isn’t all talk, and Lucas Iverson plays him as a charismatic man who can be a shameless drunk — running about barefoot and shirtless and behaving like a frat boy on a lark — but who also has considerable presence of mind in dealing with Vanya’s despair, Sonya’s crush, and Yelena’s flirty non-flirtation. There’s also a wonderfully tender scene between Astrov and Anna Roman’s stoically patient Nanny where we see how loved Astrov is, often without him being aware of it. Chekhov himself was a doctor, and the special status Astrov enjoys may have been drawn from the author’s own experiences among the countryfolk, the gentry, and the intelligentsia. Astrov is never a nobody, and he’s mostly his own person, unlike everyone else here, though how he is drawn into drunkenness shows his weaknesses.
Because of the well-played scenes between Karen Killeen’s mercurial Yelena and Rebeca Roble’s forthright Sonya, and between intrigued Yelena and smitten Astrov, it might be easy to switch the title of the play to “Doctor Astrov” or “Madame Yelena,” but we mustn’t forget the actual titular character. Samuel Douglas’ Vanya is something of a sybarite, and we expect him to be scathing and self-indulgent, to whine relentlessly and flirt outrageously. But that’s only part of Vanya’s character. He also battles with what we today would call suicidal depression, which comes out mainly when he’s forced to contemplate his shallow life in the shadow of the overbearing Alexander and in the face of the latter’s stunning wife. Vanya is the soul of the play and watching Douglas go from carping and fawning to a complete loss is the main trajectory. There’s a moment when he sidles toward the back of the stage — where huge doors open onto his workroom — that says, wordlessly, everything about his current state of mind.
The scene with Vanya waving a gun and firing shots is hilariously comic in its unhinged chaos, with Alexander trying to take cover behind an overturned table and everyone else falling about in shock and surprise. It’s a very kinetic scene, so well staged you wish you could rewind it and watch it again. That comment applies generally to the entire play, even with its 2 hour and 45 minute run time. There’s much finely calibrated work on show here, including Kamal Sehrawy’s comic turn as Alexander and Eduordo Benzoni’s memorably nervous Telegin. Baker and Gold would surely be pleased by it all; the openness of Silin Chen‘s set and the intimacy of the staging make Sammy Ziesel’s Uncle Vanya worthy of its inspiration.
Uncle Vanya runs at the Iseman Theatre, 1156 Chapel St., through Dec. 15. Visit the school of drama’s website for tickets and more information.