Moya O’Connell as Yelena and Neil Barclay as Vanya in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya
The Shaw Festival’s production of Uncle Vanya is top-notch for a number of reasons. We believe these lives before us as lives actually lived in what they reveal. They indicate themselves to be complex lives and, in what remains unknown to us, these characters exist just as much. We look at these people not with judgment but with acceptance that we could do no better. We detect precisely and sensitively rendered truths in each performance and in Jackie Maxwell’s direction a keen ability to find poetry that lives and breathes in the ways of the world. This is poetry that knows honesty and no easy answers, if any.
Overall, this memorable production has the quality of a musical composition, one filled with distinct statements developed and blended into a conceptual whole. And like great music, the unspoken prevails as much as what is said. We know we’ve been reached and been moved, as a result of all the parts speaking individually and as one, but like these characters before us we constantly feel so much and cannot quite say why. This production of Uncle Vanya proves that theatre, once experienced, can remain in each and all of us. After all, it depicts what we are.
Gently insistent music by Paul Sportelli hangs wistful, subdued and lingering. Individual lives drift into view, the ones of this world who pass with time but never move that much. In Rebecca Picherack’s subdued and sunless lighting, we hear conversation of an insulated and isolated world. It is spoken with inherent affection and familiarity. These people, we find, breathe in and out the same air and the same hopelessness. It’s a constant same old same old as people get old. It’s “Life is boring and stupid” and “I’ve become a creep.” There is little to observe happening here. These are all people who fuck up in their lives without doing that much. And people feel their lives fading away. The Shaw company cast under Jackie Maxwell’s direction of Uncle Vanya makes all of this very human and poetic and real.
Annie Baker’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is refreshingly colloquial and less formal than I remember some other translations to be, all without pandering but with the immediacy of language one might overhear at interval in the lobby. Baker’s skill, at least as directed with unwavering human insight by Maxwell, is that these words sit comfortably with the characters before us and, through them, we gain new insight into characters we know from seeing them before. Would a Russian of circa 1900 say “creep?” Would Marina call Astrov “sweetie pie?” Don’t know, but with the precisely perceptive actors in this production, the words work evocatively. The characters seem to feel them naturally, hand in glove, a perfect fit.
In any case, from what they say we still wonder if these people really care about anything at all. Or are they, like Yelena or Vanya, self-indulgent because there ain’t much else to do? Chekhov subtitled Uncle Vanya “Scenes from Country Life” and sometimes we do indeed look at these characters as lives like random trees growing here and there that to some, like Astrov, take on metaphysical value while others remain less than indifferent.
However, we experience a number of deeply touching scenes in this production, say the potent human connection of Sonya and Yelena, an energetic bonding of two women who each one lives a dead end. Their bond seems to bubble from inside as they get endearingly pissed together although, nevertheless, Sonya has to come to terms with enduring her unhappiness. She delivers a broken-hearted and heartbreaking declaration to this effect at the play’s end. What she wanted before didn’t happen and now it can’t. The way Marla McLean balances the stifled life force within Sonya with a tentative expression of its joyful abandon is painful to watch yet assertively poetic.
To be sure, these aren’t lives merely of quiet desperation since, after all, this is Chekhov and his people do talk a great deal as they get in tune with the realities of hopelessness. People here are assaulted by the needs of others and remain numb to them. They are always on the verge of playing games with each other, but games do not serve their purpose very long. These lost souls need cradling and don’t get it. And in this world, diversion or escape, when found, brings only another kind of pain to endure. Maxwell’s sensitive direction helps us to sense real lives and not simply a performance of them. Each of these lives takes a subtle hold of our feelings.
Neil Barclay’s Vanya is a man of inherent whine and a self-propelling sense of drama, a man with an inner energy and nowhere to go. His is a self-indulgent air of resignation, an assertive but love-hungry cynicism. His is a compelling resonating vocal presence, but one that declares futility, frustration, self-deception, and idleness. He brings flowers like one who wants his boredom to be passion. He is strongly present to us but in truth we find him intriguingly elusive to explanation of his character.
Marla McLean’s Sonya is a young woman full of hopeful love whose world will not allow her to feel it as she needs. She is wide-eyed about a man, Astrov, who feels and practices his ideals and she remains devoted to him, protective of him, but again she is let down by a world indifferent to her responsible and dedicated nature. To Sonya, McLean brings an appealing directness, a warm but no-nonsense quality. She seems clean with purpose and is obedient to her circumstances. Her youth, like her hair, is pulled tight and remains contained by practicality and subservience to others. She doesn’t seem to feel she deserves anything.
Moya O’Connell’s Yelena is a woman of off-handed delivery and condescending patience who can’t seem to imagine that other lives exist beyond her own, all as she hangs in her own ennui. At times, she seems ready to lose her bearing and perhaps her mind. She sees herself as a character in a play, craves order, and with an elderly husband can only declare that she will hang in because “in 5 or 6 years I’ll be old too.” On one hand, she sits securely in pointlessness and on the other is full of passion she almost dares to feel. She is unsettling to men –and to herself. She’s a magnet to the passions of others.
Astrov, played engagingly by Patrick McManus, like the rest, is untested and unrealized. Like the rest, he is part full of purpose and part lost. He is frustrated by those who do not share his ecological concerns, the one area where his passions do not waver or compensate for emptiness elsewhere in his life. “I don’t think I’m capable of loving anyone,” he declares to Sonya, who treasures him, and thus kills the possibility of love that could -or should– happen between them, but won’t. Meanwhile, his sexual attraction to Yelena is sometimes partially received but then deflected, even as he acknowledges her cancerous effect of others. In the end, he seems helpless to his aging.
David Schurmann’s Serebryakov is an index of aches and pains and ensuing complaints that, for one, he is “nearly a corpse. He is an academic who is out of touch with the world about him, self-absorbed, and spoiled by the acquiescence of others. Pain consumes him, we are led to believe, and he milks it. He is pampered like his wife and they seem infected with their uselessness as they infect others. Donna Belleville’s Maria eagerly caters to him and expects others to follow her lead. She speaks with a sense of authority that seems humanly empty, as if laying claim to other lives when she hasn’t one of her own.
Sharry Flett’s Marina is aged, somewhat stooped, and quite perky in attitude if not as securely in body. She shows the wisdom of age in her words and in her actions, both finely tuned. She almost seems to embody a Taoist clarity in her life and we wonder what has made her so. Her wisdom is unobtrusive but strong. Meanwhile, Peter Millard’s Telegin declares satisfaction with his life but facial lines and troubled eyes declare emotional scars. Always ready of guitar, he speaks the interconnectedness of lives through his instrumental commentary. Implicit in him, we sense that existence is a struggle, and a sad one.
Highly recommended.