The Broadway Theatre Review: LCT’s Uncle Vanya

By Ross

Wide and deep, sits the Vivian Beaumont stage at the Lincoln Center Theater, with set-ups of seated spaces for Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya to play itself forward. A cluttered table, littered with fragments from a meal discarded, is placed forward where the action begins to revolve around. The doctor, played with casual indifference by William Jackson Harper (LCT’s After the Blast; “The Good Place“) paces around the endearing Marina, played smartly by Mia Katigbak (NAATCO/Public’s Out of Time), in need of some nourishment of the soul, but gets, instead, a commentary on his decline. “Now you’re old and not so handsome, and you drink too much.” It doesn’t exactly ring true for Harper’s vigorous appearing Doctor Astrov, and it also doesn’t ring true for this classic play, published in 1897 and getting a prestige production on Broadway.

Filled with unrequited love and hopelessness, the play is also stitched with comedic moments of sarcastic engagements, making it seem like a perfect fit for Steve Carell (“Beautiful Boy “; 2ST/Goodman’s Sin) as the lost Uncle Vanya. But somewhere along the way, maybe lost in the emptiness of that wide deep stage, the production, as directed without a clear sense of purpose by Lila Neugebauer (2ST Broadway’s Appropriate), never finds its full function. Filled with characters lost in their stagnated heads, distracted by lust and alcohol-infused cloudiness, the play wanders around wondering why it is here. The transitions don’t really resonate and the metaphors don’t fly upward into the arena of truth-telling, ultimately failing to make a case for its high-end existence on the Broadway stage, other than to give a few well known stars their moment with Chekhov.

One of the many things going against this starry Uncle Vanya is its unfortunate timing, coming far too soon after that glorious downtown immersive event, that crowded us into a loft space that felt ever so intimate on a stormy hot summer’s eve. It was an event not to be missed, much like that other London one-man Vanya starring the magnificent Andrew Scott. Sadly, comparing those two productions to this expansive, expensive stage uptown, designed casually by Mimi Lien (Broadway’s Sweeney Todd) with serviceable lighting by Lap Chi Chu (MTC’s Morning Sun) and Elizabeth Harper (Geffen’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), haphazard costuming by Kaye Voyce (LCT’s Greater Clements), and a fine sound design by Beth Lake (LCT’s Camelot), is the most unfair of contests. In London, we were gifted with an inventive unraveling with a wise new text by playwright Simon Stephens. Downtown New York City, we were invited into a connected space that we could feel in our bones. But uptown at the Lincoln Center Theatre, those sad sacks moving through that perfect boring landscape were as distanced from our souls as the woods from their country home.

Embedded in the chaos of this mild adaptation by Heidi Schreck (What the Constitution Means to Me), this Uncle Vanya strides through the unnecessary inauthentic rain with an obsession to the highs and lows of comedy and tragedy without finding any of the middle ground within. The cast, filled with pros like Jayne Houdyshell (Broadway’s A Doll’s House, Part 2) as mother Maria, Alfred Molina (Broadway’s Red) as Professor Alexander, Alison Pill (Broadway’s Three Tall Women) as lovesick Sonia, Jonathan Hadary (Public’s A Bright Room Called Day), and Anika Noni Rose (CSC’s Carmen Jones) as centrepiece Elena, leaves them wandering aimlessly through chairs, sitting and standing, complaining and hopelessly aspiring to engagements that will never be. That is the nature of the play, but in the hands of this production’s director, we aren’t given anyone to get behind or care about, or a vantage point to ponder or connect to. They all become as flat or as annoying as the Professor’s illnesses, driving us as insane as their own desires and complaints.

Intimacy is lost in the broad expanse, unlike that stellar downtown production as we watched them desperately whispering to each other in a pool of warm candlelight, with hope and love in one’s eye, and loss and distraction in the other’s. It made us lean in, wanting, even if we knew it was as hopeless as communal action and Russian environmental responsibility in the countryside. We cared in a way that never made its way uptown to the Lincoln Center for their own starry Uncle Vanya. This Broadway production, even when milking laughs from extraneous soggy bottoms and yelling madmen, fails to inspire much beyond a simple acknowledgement of its attempt. It’s loud, expensive, and determined to make us laugh, even at the expense of its subtle poetic formulation.