Uncle Vanya Broadway Reviews

“Uncle Vanya” is a very dark play. And yet, under Neugebauer’s direction — and played by a cast featuring Steve Carell, William Jackson Harper, Anika Noni Rose, Alfred Molina and Alison Pill — every moment of this production shimmers with beauty, mirth, and, at least for the audience, hope. Despite the terrible state of things, art is still able to lift us up, take us out of our misery, and move us.

The famous misreading of Chekhov is that nothing happens in his plays. People talk, people stew, people fight; life goes on. Uncle Vanya is, on one level, a groundbreaking play of intense, stifled feelings, until the dam breaks. Schreck and Neugebauer, with a Hollywood-heavy cast, have accomplished a feat in staging a classic that feels both accessible and dense, but perhaps more so in capturing a mood of tragicomic discontent.

That it does not have one here is not fatal. Neugebauer is such a detailed director, honing every moment and movement to a chic polish, that this typically gorgeous Lincoln Center Theater production offers a hundred things to enjoy. Mimi Lien’s sylvan set, receding into the depths of the Beaumont stage, is one. Musical interludes, by the songwriter Andrew Bird, often featuring accordion and violin, are another, striking the play’s jaunty melancholy just right. Kaye Voyce’s contemporary costumes, quickly identifying each character’s status and self-concept, are wonderful, and in the case of Elena’s knit dresses with their form-hugging cuts, sensational.

The Lincoln Center “Uncle Vanya,” which is the 11th production of the play on Broadway, doesn’t completely solve the central difficulties of staging it. The production still requires patience; there’s no concession to the Tik-Tok generation. And while Schreck’s translation does bring out the humor, and gets rid of the stuffiness, it introduces potential problems of its own. Still, under Lila Neugebauer’s direction, the performances of the nine-member cast do click often enough to reward those of us who are patient.

Lila Neugebauer directs a very punchy revival of “Uncle Vanya,” which opened Wednesday at LCT’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre. Anton Chekhov’s characters suffer from ennui, but not so much in this production.

For many, though, the main attraction of this new “Vanya” will be Steve Carell, the TV and film star who is making his Broadway debut as Chekhov’s forlorn protagonist. Like other works by the playwright, “Vanya” boasts often underexploited comedic elements, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that an actor whose high-profile credits include “The Office,” “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” and the animated classic “Despicable Me” would be drawn to it.

Carell’s presence will no doubt invite fans of The Office and his other works to the theater, and they won’t be disappointed: he certainly earns his laughs as Vanya buries his pain, pokes fun at his companions, chases after a lost love. Though the bitterness boiling beneath the piece may catch them off guard, Neugebauer and Schreck have crafted an especially accessible adaptation, for better or worse. B–

What was the guiding light for Schreck and Neugebauer in tackling Vanya? Based on what’s now on stage at the Beaumont, it’s difficult to say. This revival is competent, rarely boring and often funny, but there is no sense of a larger vision. This staging just kind of sits there, without any clear reason to exist.

The result is at times hilarious and poignant, but rarely rises above the level of being just fine. Newly translated by Heidi Schreck (2019’s superb “What the Constitution Means to Me”), the classic Russian play is set in an unspecified time and place, although the presence of vinyl records and Tupperware suggest a not-so-distant past.

Unlike the characters who mention being bored at least a dozen times, the staging by director Lila Neugebauer (Appropriate) isn’t dull. It seems particularly bent on tickling out humorous textures right up until the very end. Still, one wishes the revival added up to a more cohesive and persuasive experience.

I’d be a bit more forgiving of this production if it was part of some free summer festival rather than the big Spring offering from one of our finest institutional theaters. But I wasn’t sorry I saw it, and I imagine you won’t be either.

But the audience’s three-camera sit-com chuckle does reveal this “Vanya”’s chief shortcoming straightaway. While the production has got the jokes down pat, it is quite a bit shakier when it comes to the pathos and hardship that spring from them.

In Uncle Vanya’s original setting, the characters are constrained by very real limits, financial and social; here, they seem trapped by authorial mandate—by a shadow fidelity to the mores of a different time and place. Perhaps that explains why this production, despite the talent involved, left me unmoved, and with a nagging question that Vanya might relate to: So much work has gone into this, but what’s it all for?

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.

It’s Chekhov 101 to say his characters inhabit separate worlds that rarely converge. All those rueful doctors, vain landowners, stoic laborers, and pretentious artists jabber across the samovar without really connecting or changing. Sure, they level pistols at each other (and themselves) or profess undying love, but such flashes of passion smack of solipsistic play-acting. Therein lies the comedy dusted with melancholy. Still, if Chekhov’s people are not in the same play, you hope the actors inhabiting them will be. Such is not really the case in Lincoln Center Theater’s starry but arid Uncle Vanya, staged with noncommittal chill by Lila Neugebauer.

Last summer we had the Jack Serio–directed Uncle Vanya in a postage stamp–size private Flatiron loft that seated about 40 people per performance. Now we’re getting Lila Neugebauer’s Uncle Vanya in the ludicrously capacious 1,100-seat Vivian Beaumont Theater. Sometimes, and this is one of those times, bigger does not mean better.

It’s got major names (Steve Carell is carrying the autumn roses and the gun), a major stage at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont, and a palpably earnest desire to excavate the story’s humanity. And it is, unhappily, an example of how all these things can fail to cohere into something powerful. Like its luckless hero, it shoots and misses.

The unfortunate news is that while not outrightly deficient, this Uncle Vanya — presenting figures dealing with boredom in an at-sixes-and-sevens societal climate — is somehow flat more often, surely, than director Neugebauer intends.

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.