Uncle Vanya
The Black Box Theatre, Main Street Landing, Burlington
Saturday, Feb 28, 7.30pm
Sunday, March 1, 2.00pm & 7.30pm
Tuesday, March 3, 7.30pm
Wednesday, March 4, 7.30pm
Thursday, March 5, 7.30pm
Friday, March 6, 7.30pm
Tickets $30 ($25 Senior / $20 Student)
“We drink because it hurts. We laugh because it hurts more”
David Mamet’s adaptation of Chekhov’s masterpiece is darkly funny, brutally honest and stained with wine and longing. This isn’t a tragedy, it’s a comedy with its teeth bared - the kind where people tell jokes just before their souls collapse.
A retired professor returns to his estate with his new young wife, stirring up old grudges and fresh desires; Vanya drinks because he dares not remember; Astrov makes maps of forests no one will save; Sonya desperately clings to any hope she can find, and Telegin quietly strums his ukelele. All the while, they circle the drain with drunken philosphy, forgotten songs and toasts to their own undoing.
Written in 1897, it stands as one of Anton Chekhov’s greatest works, and a pillar of the realism movement at the turn of the twentieth century. Advances in photography offered the sudden ability to record life as it actually was, and people became fascinated by the possibilities of detail, nuance and accuracy in art as well as life. Theatre was no exception and the era of realism heralded Chekhov as its literary master, alongside revered stage director, Konstantin Stanislavsky, as its champion in practice.
Uncle Vanya, The Moscow Art Theatre, 1899
Between them they removed the histrionics associated with the previous fare of the 19th century and replaced them with a new “real” method of acting that became synonymous with the Moscow Art Theater. It was a trick that the theatre has never forgotten. Although undeniably successful, the partnership was often strained, with Chekhov insisting that his plays were comedies not tragedies and that Stanislavsky was taking them too seriously, playing them with too heavy a hand. Although the great director had single-handedly transformed the acting style of the time and created a new theatrical language for his audience, the lightness of touch was never enough to satisfy Chekhov.
Konstantin Stanislavsky
Still today, the plays are performed with over-solemnity and tragic leanings that would certainly have disappointed the playwright, who maintained until his death in 1914 that he was merely trying to depict nothing more significant than life as it is: its chaos, its humor, its futility, its beauty. Chekhov’s plays lack the dopamine hits of clear morality and exact explanation that are so satisfactory to the modern ear; they are beautifully imprecise; they are the theatrical equivalent of exquisite photographs, and those who seek to extract too much literal meaning are doomed to disappointment. They should be watched, enjoyed and experienced for simply what they are and nothing more, much like life itself perhaps.
David Mamet’s simple, unaffected style is a perfect compliment to Chekhov’s purpose and his adaptation from a literal translation is masterful. Simply put, ordinary people do not speak in poetry and neither do Chekhov’s characters in Mamet’s voice. It is a version that allows a modern ear easy entry into the work, without attracting attention to itself or deviating a micron from the intention of the author.
Anton Chekhov
Is it still relevant?
Questioning the relevance of a hundred year old play, written in a pre-revolutionary Russia by an old white guy is reasonable, regardless of its reputation. It has a historical value, of course, as a foundation stone of modern naturalism in theatre, but beyond that, does Uncle Vanya justify its enduring popularity?
"Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” (1897) is a singularly psychologically destabilizing piece of theater that’s now being seen anew as a study of post-Covid paralysis, not to mention the existential dread of watching your life slip away by the spoonful. Although first produced in Moscow in 1899, it feels just like our present American age, when nobody hears anybody else because listening hurts too much; when the most comforting activity imaginable is a long, solitary walk followed by an even longer interlude of silence. This is a drama about being driven insane by the sound of other people’s desires, complaints and aspirations when you’re already being tortured by your own. The pandemic and the boorish political and public discourse that has followed has driven us inward, unable to fight back, going nuts like poor Vanya.
You could watch the play and mistake it for a genteel, comic trip down a quaint country road of the past and you’d be missing the entire point, which is that most of us are too civilized to survive the struggle with those to whom we’re inextricably tied.
As a trained physician familiar with pollution, disease and the destruction of the natural world, Chekhov wrote about decay and waste with white-hot, sorrow-filled rage. Yet as chilly a heart as he writes from, you can’t help but be enlivened by the ritualized thing that transpires in the dark of a theater: We’re all up there on that stage, comics dying slowly, but nonetheless still telling jokes until the show ends, not quite aware of the ways in which we’re our own sad punchlines.
Jon Robin Baitz, 2024, New York Times