| . | 02/15/2009
Uncle Vanya
By: Victor Gluck
Denis O’Hare as Vanya and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Yelena
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)
I have never seen a classic play so completely sabotaged by a set as the one that famed designer Santo Loquasto has created for the Classic Stage Company’s revival of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya featuring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Denis O’Hare and Peter Sarsgaard. Had the set been designed for a television taping of the play or even been mounted on a revolving stage, it would have worked beautifully. However, in a three-sided stage as the one at the CSC, Loquasto’s design keeps some part of the audience from seeing the action in every scene. Surprisingly, his design for the CSC’s production of Chekhov’s The Seagull last season was exactly the opposite: open, skeletal, unobtrusive, light and airy.
Set in rural Russia in the late 1880’s, Uncle Vanya takes place in locations in and around the Serebryakov estate. It has been run for the last 25 years by Ivan Voynitsky, called Vanya, for his brother-in-law, a college professor, formerly married to Vanya’s late sister. The play’s four acts take place in the garden and the verandah, the dining room, the drawing room, and finally, Vanya’s room which serves as both bedroom and estate office. Loquasto has designed a central staircase rising to a second floor whose landings turn three times, thereby blocking part of the view from all three sides. Vanya’s room has been placed on a second level which is almost impossible to see from any side.
The front wall of the house is created by a row of eight pillars running on a diagonal line from front to back. Aside from the garden and verandah which is clear for those sitting in the middle section, the view of the three rooms in the house are blocked both by the central staircase as well as the pillars and the furniture from all sides. To make matters worse, it appears that director Austin Pendleton, who has directed this play previously in two other productions and ought to know better, has staged the entire play from the perspective of the middle section without bothering to notice the sightlines from the other two sides. Otherwise, how do you account for one key scene hidden behind the piano, another one staged against the far back wall under the overhang of the second level, and a third blocked by the twists and turns of the central staircase. Is this any way to make a modern classic accessible to a contemporary audience?
And what of the interpretation? Pendleton has successfully grappled with the idea that Chekhov’s plays are comedies, something that director Sam Mendes neglected to take into consideration in his current revival of The Cherry Orchard at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Pendleton’s Uncle Vanya has an overall light tone and plays as a comedy. Unfortunately, the scenes feel like individual vignettes and never coalesce into a whole. It is as if he took the play’s subtitle, “Scenes from Country Life,” too literally and has directed Uncle Vanya as a series of unrelated scenes, not as a finished play.
Uncle Vanya is the story of a 47-year-old man who discovers one day that he wasted his life in the service of others, people who have taken him for granted while accepting his sacrifice without a word of thanks. This revelation takes place during one summer when Vanya’s elderly self-involved brother-in-law and his young, beautiful and bored wife Yelena have come to stay at the estate to save money. Also at the estate is Maria Vasilyevna, Vanya’s mother who worships her son-in-law the professor, and Sonya, the professor’s daughter by his first wife, about the same age as her stepmother. Drawn to the house party is the local doctor Astrov who is attending the professor but also flirting with Yelena. The characters argue, debate, complain, bicker, rest, and analyze, until the moment when the professor calls a meeting to suggest selling the estate and all of the summer’s suppressed emotions explode.
As Vanya, O’Hare plays him like an antic clown, continually restive and kinetic. Unfortunately, he never becomes the central character as the title suggests he should be. As his sister-in-law, pursued by both Vanya and the doctor, Gyllenhaal successfully establishes her boredom and her self-involvement. She does not achieve the glamorous allure that would explain why all the men are in love with her or why everyone is kowtowing to her needs. Much more successful is Sarsgaard, better cast here than in last fall’s Broadway production of Chekhov’s The Seagull. His Astrov is a multi-faceted portrayal, both tragic and comic, a man of great talents addicted to drinking as he finds himself buried in the country.
Mamie Gummer, seen most recently in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Roundabout, is quite believable as the hard-working Sonya but her character appears to be on the verge of crying at every moment. Delphi Harrington is quite elegant and refined as the culture-obsessed mother of Vanya and the professor’s former mother-in-law. As Professor Aleksandr Serebryakov, George Morfogen captures his pedantic nature but fails to show how demanding and difficult a man he is. Veteran actor Louis Zorich is unable to do much with the cameo role of the neighbor nicknamed “Waffles.” As the family’s old nurse, Cyrilla Baer seems entirely too young to have been the nanny to any of the characters.
Performed in the Carol Rocamora translation, the play is easy to follow and the language is quite accessible. Suzy Benzinger’s often rumpled period costumes make it possible to feel the summer heat that the characters continually complain about. Loquasto’s overly constructed set doesn’t give lighting designer Jason Lyons a great deal to do other than make sure that the actors are lit up. Ryan Rumery and Daniel Baker’s sound design adequately portrays the sounds of the surrounding nature, such as the birds in the garden and the sound of rain on the roof.
Anton Chekhov’s plays are often ruined by American directors who fail to believe that they really are intended as comedies, that is, the audience is always in possession of more knowledge that the self- deluded characters. Austin Pendleton’s revival of Uncle Vanya which nicely captures the humor is overwhelmed by its massive setting by the usually reliable designer Santo Loquasto which does not allow the audience to fully concentrate on the actors at work. The performances vary from excellent to only partially developed in a production that seems to have needed more time to find its way.
Uncle Vanya (through March 8)
Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-352-3101 or http://www.classicstage.org
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