'Uncle Vanya' review: Excellent performances hampered by Chicago factory staging
Servi-Sure is a company that manufactures titanium anodizing racks inside factory in the Bowmanville neighborhood, next to some well-known breweries. Last year, the factory also served as the setting for The New Theatre Project’s production of the Caryl Churchill play “Far Away,” an effort that gained some renown for recalling the scrappiest glory days of the Chicago storefront scene. It also fell into a category that can be called “site-specific” theater, since the play takes place partially in a hat factory.
Now the same director, Spencer Huffman, stages an uneven but fitfully exceptional version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” in a corner of the Servi-Sure space.
“Uncle Vanya,” to clarify, is not set in a factory at all. It’s set on an estate in rural Russia at the very end of the 19th century. Sometimes, as in this case, a factory is not a factory but “just” a no-frills theater space, still representing a company’s resourcefulness but not an artistic choice of any note. In fact, it’s a space that’s hard to light, with challenging acoustics. So expecting the factory to add layers of authenticity and meaningful grit rather than practical challenges could leave you disappointed.
I suppose you could argue that works because “Vanya” is fundamentally about disappointment, but on a way different, existential scale. The play, and particularly its titular character, embodied here by veteran Chicago actor Lawrence Grimm (whose last name could not be more fitting), expresses excessive disappointment, excessively. The playwright Aaron Posner wrote a contemporary adaptation of this work, which Lookingglass Theater staged in 2016. He called it, “Life Sucks.” As that suggests, the play can also be extremely funny in its poetic pondering of the unhappy.
This production, with its faithful but evocative translation by Annie Baker, gets the despair, an awful lot of that humor, and some of the work’s poignancy. But it’s frequently caught in between a lot of competing impulses and realities — contemporize the costume design or don’t; situate us in an every-space or a recognizable room; theatricalize the characters’ soliloquies (as the lights seem to do) or treat them as if these people just talk out loud to themselves a lot (as the playing style seems to do).
The problematic nature of the design and some directing choices can make the acting here feel heroic in pulling you out of self-consciousness and into the dramatic moment. The famed critic Richard Gilman explained that what made Chekhov so revolutionary as an artist was valuing the exposure of deeper layers of character over traditional narrative, thus replacing “the force of locomotion” with the power of “presence.” To this show’s great credit, you can feel that powerful sense of presence here, albeit not at every moment.
This is a highly intimate production — there are about 20 chairs on each side of the playing space in the middle — with an amazingly accomplished cast, and some of these performances rank right up there with the best versions of these characters I’ve seen.
Jonathan Weir invests the pompous Professor (in most versions known as Serebryakov) with a compelling gravity, so that you do understand how he’s managed to attract two out-of-his-league wives, but also a whininess that makes it feel wonderfully true when the family Nanny (Jean Marie Koon, very lovable here) treats him like a baby. As the Professor’s beautiful wife Yelena, Rae Gray is the most successful of anyone in making her character’s boredom both ever-present and surprisingly active.
Jonathan Shaboo plays Astrov, a doctor (like Chekhov) and early environmentalist, and effectively brings the worst out in a character that in many ways is the most likable but who, in Baker’s translation, is also a “creep.”
My personal favorite performance comes from Olivia Lindsay as Sonya, who is the niece to Uncle Vanya, the daughter of the Professor, and desperately, hopelessly in love with Astrov. The truth is I couldn’t always hear Lindsay that well as her voice could be swallowed up amid the vastness of the factory, but her Sonya bounced from happy to sad and back again in bursts of honest emotion that instantly brought a charge of life that represents exactly the presence Gilman was referring to.
The production flags badly in pace as it sputters to its ending, beginning to confuse the depiction of tedium with dramatic listlessness. But it also ends with a lovely image, a lingering, flickering light of hope amid a vastness of despair.