Chekhov, Misfiring

An Uncle Vanya that’s all talk.

- Sara Holdren

 

For a middle-aged estate manager with a drinking problem, a crush on his former brother-in-law’s too-young new wife, and a creeping horror that he has wasted his life, Ivan Petrovich Voynitsky—known to all as Vanya—is so hot right now. Jack Serio’s “loft Vanya” was a coveted ticket last year, and in London, Andrew Scott recently played all the parts. Perhaps it has to do with pandemic-adjacent claustrophobia or existential crisis, but whatever the case, Heidi Schreck’s new translation of Chekhov’s play joins a busy field. This production’s got names (Steve Carell is carrying the autumn roses and the gun), a high-profile stage, and a palpably earnest desire to excavate the story’s humanity—and it is, unhappily, an example of how these things can fail to cohere into something powerful. Like its luckless hero, it shoots and misses.