Why is it called “Uncle Vanya”?
All the man does is mope, mope harder, try to do something other than moping, fail miserably and mope some more.
Vanya has spent most of his nearly 50 years scraping thin profit from a provincial estate, and not even for himself.
The “Uncle Vanya” that opened on Wednesday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, its 10th Broadway revival in 100 years, sees Chekhov’s epochal bet and raises it.
If Vanya is properly no hero in this amusing but rarely deeply affecting production, it’s because he’s no one at all.
Without a camera trained on such a man, you quickly learn to ignore him, as you would in real life.
Indeed, in Lila Neugebauer’s sleek, lucid staging, you barely notice Vanya even as he makes his first entrance, hidden behind a bench.
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All the man does is mope, mope some more, try to do something other than mope, fail miserably, and then mope some more. Why is it called “Uncle Vanya”?
He cannot be blamed. Vanya has been scrounging meager earnings from a small estate in the province for the majority of his almost fifty years—not even for himself. He runs a farm with his single niece, and the money he makes from this venture supports his fatuous, gouty sort of ex-brother-in-law, an art professor who “knows nothing about art,” in the city. Vanya is also madly in love with the elderly man’s incredibly languid young wife, who understandably thinks the old man is pitiful.
Let me put it this way: he is the antithesis of the audacious, admirable characters that most writers of the late 1890s would choose to write a play for. That is most likely the reason Chekhov introduced a novel type of protagonist for a novel genre of drama. He could no longer portray life to audiences as heroic because it had become squalid and absurd in his experience. How then is his protagonist a hero?
The tenth Broadway revival of “Uncle Vanya” in a century began on Wednesday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, seeing and raising Chekhov’s historic wager. In this lighthearted but infrequently profoundly moving production, Vanya isn’t really a hero; rather, he’s nobody at all. He vanishes, overcome with despair.
Considering that he is portrayed by Steve Carell, the star of “The Office” and, possibly more pertinently, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” that would seem to be quite the trick. From those appearances, Carell’s Vanya borrows the weaselly overeagerness that makes you roll your eyes at him while simultaneously raising concerns about his mental state. He cracks untrue jokes. He becomes ecstatic about the wrong things. He called for rain to arrive.
You quickly learn to ignore such a man, just as you would in real life, if there’s no camera trained on him. In fact, Vanya is so well-staged by Lila Neugebauer that you hardly even notice him when he first appears, concealed behind a bench. You don’t really listen to him when he speaks; in Heidi Schreck’s polished, authentic, yet casual new rendition, his opening remarks are, of course, complaints. “My life has been complete chaos ever since the professor showed up with his spouse,” he states, adding a bitterly sarcastic note to the last sentence. “.
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