The New Uncle Vanya’s Aims Are Off

For a middle-aged estate manager with a drinking problem, a crush on his former brother-in-law’s too-young new wife, and a creeping horror that he has wasted his life, Ivan Petrovich Voynitsky — known to friends and audiences as Vanya — is so hot right now. Chekhov’s plays have an uncanny tendency to resurface in waves in the English-speaking theater, and we’re in an Uncle Vanya moment. Perhaps it has to do with a pandemic-adjacent sense of claustrophobia or the relatability of existential crisis. Whatever the case, arriving in the wake of Jack Serio’s hot-ticket “loft Vanya” and Andrew Scott’s London-based experiment with playing all the characters at once, Heidi Schreck’s new translation of the second of Chekhov’s “big four” works is entering a busy playing field. 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.

“I’m bored!”; “She’s so bored she’s just staggering around”; “God, I really am dying of boredom”; “You know why you and I are such good friends, Vanya? Because we’re both such boring, tedious people.” So say Schreck’s versions of the characters thrust together on the country estate where Vanya (Carell) and his niece, Sonia (Alison Pill), live with Vanya’s withholding mother (Jayne Houdyshell) and the tolerant old nanny, Marina (Mia Katigbak, being wonderful) — the estate where the smart, troubled, hard-drinking local doctor, Astrov (William Jackson Harper), and the endearing oddball of a neighbor, Waffles (Jonathan Hadary), come to spend their days and where the old routines have recently been thrown into chaos by the arrival of “the professor” (Alfred Molina) and his beautiful young wife, Elena (Anika Noni Rose). If there’s a principal trap that American productions of Chekhov, this one included, tend to hurl themselves into, it’s taking all this talk of boredom at face value. There’s a reason that whole schools of acting — and the entire art of modern direction — developed in tandem with Chekhov’s plays, and it’s because they require the construction of vast underground cities: The text itself is a constellation of spires, minarets, and domes, their tips peeking up through the surface of a desert after a civilization-burying sandstorm. Envisioning and, crucially, enacting the limitless subtextual architecture of the plays are the great tasks, but here, Lila Neugebauer’s actors feel unrooted, their energy too often scattershot or droopy. They’re playing the uppermost level of the text, which makes for a drifting, sleepy feeling — whence the ancient and misguided, but all too often theatrically justifiable, complaint that in Chekhov “nothing happens.”

The objective is to figure out what’s happening and then do it. But though there are plenty of appealing performers in this Vanya, there’s also an enervating absence of emotional events taking place. The acting teacher Mira Rostova, who studied with Stanislavsky, talked about theatrical action in terms of the “Doings.” A line of text, she posited, must be doing something essential: the “admit,” for example, or the “lament with humor,” the “defy,” or “the demonstration of amazement.” (The playwright Sarah Ruhl, who translated Three Sisters in 2013, makes a point of noting just how much this kind of lament differs from the very American notion of complaint: The first is rich with existential irony; the second is whiny, hard-done-by, entitled.) The Doings have uplift and drive to them — inside of language that can seem to sigh and meander, or simply to be describing states of being (“I’m all mixed up,” “I’m exhausted,” “I’m so happy”), they can provide actors with muscle and teeth, concrete things to be fighting for or guarding against. Here, one gets the sense that Neugebauer and her ensemble have done plenty of talking about the play but that somewhere between the table and the stage, good ideas have diffused or have floated back up into the realm of theory. They haven’t coalesced into engines — they’re not living in the actors’ blood and bones.

Intertwined issues of script, casting, and direction are at work here. Schreck has given the text a hard shove toward the contemporary and the casual (a choice that’s echoed in Kaye Voyce’s costumes, which have Astrov in hospital scrubs, Sonia in shorts and boots, and Elena in a different luxe jewel-tone dress for each act). She has also done away with any mention of Russia and with patronymics and diminutives. While all this updating and tone tweaking is theoretically fine, it lands Neugebauer’s production in a kind of no-place, a generalized now-ishness that hits bumps when a bit of formality escapes Schreck’s sandpaper (“Two or three more words and then it’s over,” “I can feel the touch of his hands … The second he shows up, I run to him and start babbling”), or when a character’s attitude jangles up against our present. “What I don’t understand is why we’re still destroying entire forests,” insists the environmentally conscious Astrov. “Why not?” says Vanya, still speaking like a man in 1899. These blips of cognitive dissonance can, cumulatively, weaken a play’s feeling of solidity; they make it harder, subconsciously, for both actors and audience to hold on. Of the company, only Katigbak, Hadary, and Molina sound really at home — Katigbak and Hadary because they know exactly how to access the cosmic acceptance, wry in Marina’s case and bemused but sincere in Waffles’s, that the rest of the characters lack; Molina because, along with the affectations of his character, his own British accent does him a service. It gives him a natural boost toward style, makes him sound comfortable in language that hasn’t entirely found its own sense of ease.

Of course, it’s true that Chekhov’s people are discontented — horribly and hilariously so — but a feeling of gnawing frustration in a character is different from a lack of release in a performance. And at the center of this Uncle Vanya is a quartet of actors who, while they all have the individual capacity to be lovely or poignant or very funny, aren’t sparking the necessary alchemy, or even chemistry. No one gets what they want, but the currents of need — both platonic and very much not — that crackle between Elena and Astrov and Vanya and Sonia should make our arm hairs prickle. Neugebauer, however, is presiding over one of the least sexy Vanyas I’ve ever seen. The real rain that douses the Beaumont’s stage in Act Two (it’s truly the rainy season on Broadway) is the most sensual thing in the production.

Both Carell and Harper have flexed their comic chops on TV, but neither cracks open easily into naked pathos or desire, and Neugebauer hasn’t helped them find it. Harper, especially, needs to fascinate two women and, eventually, be rocked by lust for one of them — but his Astrov’s particular brand of suffering doesn’t make much room for stuff below the neck. That itchy, avoidant, raised-eyebrow quality hits home when he goes on an anxious tear — he’s delightful in a rant about how weird people find him — and it’s part of what made him so wonderful on The Good Place. In that show, Chidi’s sacral chakra (the sexy one) is closed, while his crown (intellect and spirit) is dizzyingly exploded. But it’s not enough here, nor is it helped by Pill’s Sonia, who has a worked-up, easily tearful childishness about her that belies both the rock-solidness of the character’s feelings for Astrov and, still more important, her anchoring role as the play’s moral center.

Carell does locate moments of morbid fun (often extratextual, as when he and Harper’s Astrov get drunk together and he grabs a lamp and fakes electrocution), but his Vanya never really breaks in two. The audience is happy to laugh when, after plummeting into despair, he unsuccessfully fires off two shots at the professor — and the moment should be funny; it is funny. It’s also something else, something so painful it should take the breath out of us. Here, like so much else, it doesn’t reach our guts.

The performers’ struggle to connect is also tied to the mise en scène. Somehow, in trying to go vast and “expressionistic,” Neugebauer and scenic designer Mimi Lien have stumbled back around into vagueness and cliché. There’s a photo of sad birch trees as a backdrop (though it moves up- and downstage, the extra depth it reveals is never taken advantage of as playing space), and in front of it are standard collections of furniture, one meant to be outdoors, the next indoors — though, strangely, each setup has almost the exact same footprint, as if the company got used to one arrangement in the rehearsal room and never bothered to rethink it. Most oppressive of all, when the action moves indoors, Lien flies in a heavy brown wall. Everything already felt brown, and now the soporific monochrome is complete. The actors’ relationship to all this furniture is lackluster, normative; they give a lot of their energy away to chairs. In one moment, Carell leaps up on a table and it makes you blink. In context, it feels forced and awkward, but that’s only because no one’s body has as yet been similarly activated. Oh, what a world it could be if such a leap emerged from a consistent through-line of full physical expression.

We still don’t know how to do Chekhov in this country. Our laments lack humor and our humor lacks lament, we complain where we could defy, and we rarely demonstrate — or provoke — amazement. “I want to live,” insist his characters. “We have to live.” That’s not a sigh. It’s a howl, a gauntlet, an invitation to existential scale that bursts the limits of our theatrical thinking, no matter what degree of “realism” a production’s aesthetic might express. The tunnels and caverns of his texts encourage infinite exploration, but even when we love him, study him, and get excited about him around a read-through table or in an acting class, we’re still too apt to wind up with productions about birch trees and ennui. We’re still liable to hear “boredom” and end up with boring.

Uncle Vanya is at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center Theater.