Steve Carell leads a star studded cast in Anton Chekhov’s UNCLE VANYA.
Sonia and her uncle Vanya have devoted their lives to managing the family farm in isolation, but when her celebrated, ailing father and his charismatic wife move in, their lives are upended. In the heat of the summer, the wrong people fall in love, desires and resentments erupt, and the family is forced to reckon with the ghosts of their unlived lives.
Director Lila Neugebauer (The Waverly Gallery, The Wolves) and playwright Heidi Schreck (What the Constitution Means to Me) collaborate on the premiere of this Lincoln Center Theater production of Uncle Vanya, which pairs Anton Chekhov‘s enduring masterpiece with one of America’s most celebrated contemporary playwrights in a strikingly immediate new translation.
But that crackling charge you hope from Uncle Vanya—the sense of a hot summer and the alternately comic and tragic cauldron a family adrift and questioning and interrogating themselves individually and as a unit—feels unmet here. Neugebauer’s loose direction—so different from the sharp and precisely realized Appropriate—doesn’t give the characters space to breathe, but instead an unintended void in which to lose themselves, and our attention.
Molina, relentlessly and yet deliciously loquacious, has the unexamined life down cold. But that’s about the only performance that feels fully secure here, mostly because this is a character utterly oblivious to the needs of other human beings. Elsewhere, it feels like the cast is living in their own little pools of life-light on the giant Lincoln Center stage, with a design from Mimi Lien that might look quite lovely but alas de-emphasizes the human traffic on the stage. You feel like you are watching nine different performances in nine different shows. Laughs are few and far between, even though they are typically a staple of this particular drama, the relief they offer being crucial to its themes. Frankly, when the most interesting moment is when it rains on stage and your eyes go to the drainage mechanism rather than anyone’s ecstasy or soggy despair, that’s not an especially good sign. Part of the issue here is Heidi Schreck’s translation, which somehow doesn’t pull people together enough, even though that’s the director’s job too. It’s a wry and smart adaptation, in places, but it doesn’t land either as an overtly contemporary interpretation nor something trying to amplify the era of the 1895 play. Indeed, temporal confusion is one of the main problems here. Kaye Voyce’s costumes read as contemporary, mostly, but that fights the lines the characters are speaking and most certainly the setting. “Uncle Vanya” never works without a strong, clear point of view and this one is just too hard to track.
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Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
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2024 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play | Marin Ireland |
2024 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Lighting Design of a Play | Stacey Derosier |
2024 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Revival of a Musical | Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club |
2024 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Revival of a Play | Uncle Vanya |
2024 | Drama League Awards | Distinguished Performance | Steve Carell |
2024 | Drama League Awards | Distinguished Performance | Willam Jackson Harper |
2024 | Drama League Awards | Outstanding Direction of a Play | Lila Neugebauer |
2024 | Drama League Awards | Outstanding Revival of a Play | Uncle Vanya |
2024 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play | William Jackson Harper |
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