The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: OHenry Productions’ Uncle Vanya

By Ross

The heat and humidity of New York City settle onto my skin like a heavy coat made of despair as I make my way up to the fourth floor of that downtown loft where OHenry Productions‘ dynamic and intimate Uncle Vanya is rolling itself out to an audience of 40 lucky souls. With the well-established translation by Paul Schmidt firmly in hand, Chekov’s iconic play expands magnificently, feeling as fresh and modern as ever inside a space that opens itself up to us with wide sad arms and a captivating embrace, even as we fan ourselves determined to stay cool. With a long wooden table taking center stage, surrounded on all sides by the seated few, the rendering gives off a feeling reminiscent of a time and place that I was never fortunate enough to have been around for. The environment, as designed most intricately by Walt Spangler (2ST/Broadway’s Between Riverside and Crazy), with simple but pooling lighting by Stacey Derosier (NYTW’s How To Defend Yourself) and detailed props by Carrie Mossman (Barrow St’s The Effect), captivates a similar air to a scene from one of my favorite films, “Reds” (directed and starring Warren Beaty) where artists, intellectuals, writers, and actors gather together in an earthy beach house by the sea to act out works in progress with their friends and colleagues gathered around as their audience. The downtown Manhattan loft space that we find ourselves in radiates that communal heat, daring us to become part of that community and give ourselves over to the unpacking. Engaged and inspired by the talented artists that surround us, we lean into their proximity, feeling their pain and intense loneliness as they deliciously take the most solid crack at Anton Chekov’s classic piece of art called Uncle Vanya. 

Sitting and knitting quietly in this expansive space, Marina, the old nurse, played touchingly by the wonderful Virginia Wing (NAAP’s Oliver!), gives the room a feeling of contentment, even as we know that the energy is anything but that. The doctor slowly enters, in a complete state of exhaustion. The heavy air is immediately infused with that needed stalled state that is so integral to the play, and we immediately feel for the slim-framed Astrov, portrayed ever so captivatingly by Will Brill, (Broadway’s Oklahoma!), laboring his overheated body down into the chair, too tired for tea or the food offered. We connect to his heated stance sprawled out before us and feel its heavy lean weight. His slouched framework elevates in its depressed tone, giving Astrov’s tree-loving, climate-changing rants a more illuminating registry, never sounding more immediate and profound than they do here. “We were born with the ability to reason and the power to create and be fruitful, but until now all we’ve done is destroy whatever we see.”

“The forests are disappearing one by one,” he tells anyone who is willing to listen. “The rivers are polluted, wildlife is becoming extinct, the climate is changing for the worse, every day the planet gets poorer and uglier.” He sees a future world of which we know and understand, as we are surprised by Chekov’s clear futuristic vision, yet also engaged with Astrov’s passionate love deadened by the heaviness of his outlook that somehow both inspires and saddens us all. He is a changed man, he believes, perceiving the loss of his looks over these past ten years, drinking out of boredom, and saddled with a sad sense of loss and despair.  “I’m a freak,” he proclaims, with the demon of distraction playing strong havoc on his, and a number of others’ heavy hearts. We can’t help but breathe in his conflicted tendencies, seeing his stifled self but also understanding how trapped he truly is.

And we can understand how the love-tortured Sonya, played to perfection by Marin Ireland (ATC’s Blue Ridge), can find herself standing by passively as she hears of his inability to love and be loved. Their candle-lit scene in the kitchen mesmerizes with profound intimacy, as she talks him into not drinking, at least for the moment, flickering in the highlight of this unraveling, and of the evening in general. It’s breathtakingly simple; in the way she stares at the oblivious Astrov, giving him her all, yet somehow, quite miraculously, he doesn’t comprehend. We feel the electricity that bursts out of Sonya, and almost see the sparks fall dead in the air somewhere in between, failing to make contact with the distracted doctor who unknowingly holds her heart in his hands. It really is the most touchingly real moment, in a series of captivating engagements and disengagement that continually fill the loft space in the most compelling of ways.

The cast, revolving around this unspoken rejection, illicit a disconnected energy of disillusionment that infiltrates and hangs inside the warm humid air surrounding us, with the saddened Vanya, played by Tony-winning director David Cromer (Broadway’s The Waverly Gallery), moving through the space as if the weight of that air is as heavy as his soul. The portrayal starts out slow, but gains momentum as the play shuffles intensely forward to the pistol-thrusting climax. All of the connections are subtle and strong, especially between him and Professor Serebryakov, played solidly by Thomas Jay Ryan (MTC’s The Nap) who was once married to Vanya’s now-deceased sister. But more importantly, it is the energy that exists within the house currently, hanging like humid air, revolving dangerously around Serebryakov’s second wife, the much younger and ever so elegant wife, Yelena, played gorgeously detached by the magnificent Julia Chan (West End’s 2:22 A Ghost Story).

Dressed with a special splash of stylistic color by costume designer Ricky Reynoso (HBO’s “We’re Here”), Yelena demands slyly center stage without ever consciously asking for it. And the whole lot of them pain the process as completely and clearly as the gout (or is it rheumatism?), which tortures the narcissistic soul of the Professor, and in turn his wife, Yelena. She slides around the space, knowing her effect, but working quietly to do nothing for anyone beyond being the beautiful and stylish disease that has infected all the men that scurry around her. Breezing by, bored with her self-inflicted uselessness, Chan’s Yelena casts an unconscious miraculous fog over Vanya, and Astrov (Brill), bringing them to their knees, while sighing and annoyed at and in her own melancholy.

“What is it about you men?” Yelena asks in frustration. “You can’t leave a woman alone until she belongs to you!” And it is in that neglectful dismissal that this gorgeous unpacking finds its fire and its fiery. Yelena, living in a desperate need for distraction and elevation, somehow manages to smash the unhappy rose-petalled party into ruin, kissing the man who wants her, but who should really want Sonya. It all feels so wrong, even to Yelena, but she somehow convinces herself that she needs this, I’m guessing, more than anyone else does. And in that moment we see her selfish unhappiness, and sadly, her disregard for the more careful Sonya.

The play, in these moments of disconnected engagement, couldn’t feel more current and engaging, as played out so beautifully by this solidly talented cast, and as directed most intelligent and intimately by Jack Serio (Ohenry’s This Beautiful Future). Their Uncle Vanya reaches out and almost sits in our lap (and it almost did when the magnificent Ireland casually collided with my shoulder searching for a candle in the blackened darkness of the room). The production draws us in at arm’s length, to their frustration and to their boredom ever so elegantly and simply, with the cast moving around us and the space with that familiar sense of ease and anxiety. The ending is the final stamp of brilliance and power, as we watch two desperately unhappy souls sit at a table sentencing their own selves to a lifetime of misery and sadness, stuffed inside numbers and accounts, as the Professor and his wife flee the countryside that they, in their own way, have demolished and stripped of its greenery and its life. “You and I, Uncle Vanya, we have to go on living,” she quietly insists, noting the hardships and sadness that lay before them, but also seeing it from a different angle, that when the two of them are both dead and gone, “we’ll see a brand-new life, all shining and beautiful.”

The ache hangs heavy in the night air, as we watch the two of them scribble numbers on pads of paper in a pool of light. Back at work, but feeling the slipping away of something that resembled hope, or at least a slice of it. Ireland rises herself magnificently and quietly to the occasion. Just like she did, bathed in candlelight in the kitchen with the unknowing man she loves, illuminated and shining, but somehow darkly contained, all the while staying almost heartbreakingly sincere and still. Just like all of these characters and their lives.

After seeing this illuminating and intimate version of the play performed to perfection by this stellar cast, I had a dream that felt like I was inhabiting the same lofty disillusioned space of Uncle Vanya. I was speaking, most passionately, about working so so hard to learn and perfect a new language; Russian, as it turns out. And I was trying to convince this privileged young bored man of its importance (who this man was, I could not tell you), but in my speech, it became clear that it was more about the idea of ‘living’ in the here and now, of pushing away the boredom of life and finding some passion in the world that we live in presently. A telling embodiment of the opposite of Sonya’s conclusion; to not wait for the last-breath finale to find the beauty and the shining new life beyond the grave. I’d like to try to have some of that life now, Sonya, if you don’t mind. (It might very well be when I see Andrew Scott perform a one-man Vanya in the West End in October of this year. So excited for that) And you all are welcome to come along with me to find that excitement now. Maybe it can be found in that downtown loft. Or in that West End theatre. Your call, but find it if you can.

The encore engagement of the critically-acclaimed, “sold-out-before-you-heard-about-it” (The New Yorker) Ohenry Production of Uncle Vanya, which originally opened on July 6, will now close on Sunday, September 3, 2023. For tickets and information, visit vanyanyc.com