On a late winter morning, the cast of the new production of Uncle Vanya, starring Steve Carell and directed by Lila Neugebauer, begins to arrive at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York’s Lincoln Center. The actors—Carell, Alfred Molina, Anika Noni Rose, William Jackson Harper, Alison Pill, Jayne Houdyshell, Mia Katigbak, and Jonathan Hadary—had recently assembled for a read-through of the script, a new adaptation by Heidi Schreck of the Anton Chekhov masterwork, but this morning’s gathering for Vogue marks the true beginning of their journey together. They loiter around a catering table and introduce themselves. Rehearsals begin tomorrow and the play opens in April.
“A great director, a great translation, and a classic play, those three things,” says Carell, are what drew him to Vanya. “The play also feels current and speaks to human behavior that hasn’t changed in a hundred years,” he adds. “Chekhov nails down the essence of how human beings think, and talk, and react, and feel the life around them.”
Uncle Vanya is indeed an astonishingly modern play, with its meditations on money, class, work, the environment, and masculinity. But it’s also profoundly human in its themes: the finitude of life, lost dreams, and unrequited love. It cuts so deeply because “the dilemmas are of the heart, and completely comprehensible,” says Hadary, the veteran New York stage actor who plays Waffles. “They are not characters in a play. They’re people. They’re us.” Carell concurs: “They’re just so specifically drawn that they feel absolutely real and lived-in.” He pauses, gathering his thoughts on the playwright. “I mean, the guy was a genius.”
Uncle Vanya was first staged at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899 by the impresario Konstantin Stanislavski, who, as the founder of the performance process called the Method, changed acting forever. Chekhov considered his plays comedies, drolly complaining in his letters that Stanislavski’s original production missed the humor in Uncle Vanya. But the play is both: a comedy about misunderstandings and misconstruals (“They’re always saying the wrong things to the wrong people,” Carell observes), and a tragedy about lives wasted—or stalled in a holding pattern.
Here is the story: A vain, pompous professor, Serabryakov (Molina), retires to “his” (the quotation marks are crucial) 26-room country estate with his second wife, Yelena (Rose). Their arrival disturbs the peace (or inertia) of the household: Resentments are aired, passions are inflamed, rages are unearthed. The professor announces his intention to sell, but the estate, we learn, is not his—it belongs to Sonya (Pill), his adult daughter from his first marriage. Sonya and her uncle Vanya function as the managers of the estate, where Vanya’s feminist mother, Mama Voinitski (Houdyshell), a nanny named Marina (Katigbak), and a guitar-plucking family friend (Hadary)—the aforementioned Waffles—also live. Astrov (Harper), a local doctor, environmentalist, depressive, and probable alcoholic rounds out the cast.
We have complicated feelings about each of them. They are all, as Molina says, “terribly, infuriatingly human”: They’re emotionally stunted, they mock and belittle and use each other as scapegoats, yet they are, ultimately, good-hearted and (like all of us) trapped in cycles of self-destruction and self-deception. In the play’s climactic scene, one of the more famous in theater history, Vanya loses his mind, gets a gun, fires (twice) at the professor, whom he blames—unfairly—for all the injustices he believes plague him, including, apparently, a failed writing career. (“I could have been a Schopenhauer,” he howls, “a Dostoevsky.”) Says Carell: “He’s created this world of illusion for himself to get by. And then when he actually can’t even create the illusion, it’s heartbreaking.”
What follows are questions about how to live with shame, regret, and grief, about how to continue existing when the dream of life has been deferred. “The final battle of the play is getting to a place of acceptance that does not feel resigned,” says Pill. “The message is that you have to actively accept your circumstances at every point and not just resign yourself to them. Even though, from the outside, acceptance and resignation may look very alike.”
Last year, Neugebauer, who has led a series of riveting productions, including Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s current Broadway hit, Appropriate, was invited to direct a play at Lincoln Center Theater. She and André Bishop, the organization’s producing artistic director, discovered a shared love of Chekhov. “I suddenly felt that Vanya had everything to say to me about my own life,” says Neugebauer, “which I’ve learned is a bit of a pattern with Chekhov plays and aging.” Neugebauer is just 38 but adds, “I guess I’ve now lived long enough for the play to break my heart.” She knew she wanted to collaborate on an adaptation with Schreck, whose 2019 play What the Constitution Means to Me was the most produced show in American theaters last fall. Schreck and Neugebauer have known each other since a 2008 production in Louisville, Kentucky, of A Christmas Carol; later, they lived in the same Brooklyn brownstone.
