CONSIDER THE GUN

The director Lila Neugebauer interrogates the ghosts of "Uncle Vanya."

- HELEN SHAW

One late-January day, the director Lila Neugebauer was at a gun-range or an antiseptic, fluorescent white version of one-tucked inside the Specialists, Ltd., a theatrical-props behemoth in Ridgewood, Queens. Neugebauer, accompanied by two members of her team, had come to discuss a gun for her upcoming production of Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," at Lincoln Center Theatre. The production is a starry one, with Steve Carell in the title role, alongside Alfred Molina, Alison Pill, Anika Noni Rose, and William Jackson Harper. With a new translation by the playwright Heidi Schreckwho was nominated for a Tony for her women's-rights jeremiad "What the Constitution Means to Me"-this is the first Broadway staging of Chekhov's masterpiece in more than twenty years.

Neugebauer is small and quick, with flyaway black hair, straight black brows crossing a narrow face, and intent gray-green-golden eyes, like a fox's. She is a rarity among New York theatrical directors, both for her relative youth-she's thirty-eight, with the career of someone a generation older-and for her recent move into film. According to Jennifer Lawrence, who starred in Neugebauer's 2022 movie début, "Causeway," about a soldier recovering from a brain injury, she is a "tiny genius with a boom in one hand and a sword in the other." The director was having a breakneck season. In December, she had opened a blockbuster Broadway revival of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's "Appropriate"-a knockdown, drag-out inheritance drama set in a decaying plantation house, starring Sarah Paulson-and she was now negotiating its transfer to a larger venue. At the same time, she was in rehearsals at the Public for Itamar Moses's "The Ally," a weighty, campus-set play about a Jewish professor being urged to denounce Israeli policies, and she was deep into preparation for "Vanya," finessing the script with Schreck.