Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Richard Nelson’s take on UNCLE VANYA is intimate and emotionally rewarding

• By drediman
• September 20, 2018
• No Comments

Alice Cannon, Yvonne Woods, and Jay O. Sanders in Richard Nelson’s version of “Uncle Vanya” by Anton Chekhov at the Kaye Playhouse, courtesy of Hunter Theater Project.

Often times, watching the plays of Anton Chekhov performed can be as languorous and static an experience one can have in the theater. To shake things up, some more adventurous directors have taken more bold approaches. They would likely argue that Chekhov wrote these plays as comedies, too, thereby allowing them to take liberties to heighten the buffoonery of the playwright’s stage works. In other words, I’ve largely come across two distinct approaches to performing Chekhov.

Last night at the Kaye Playhouse, I caught a version of Uncle Vanya by Richard Nelson – perhaps best known to New York theatergoers as the playwright responsible for the understated “real-time” plays that comprise The Apple Family and The Gabriels at the Public Theater – courtesy of the newly-formed Hunter Theatre Project. The translation (by Mr. Nelson, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky) and production (the elegantly spare direction is by Mr. Nelson) both conspire to create an Uncle Vanya as strikingly true to life as I’ve come across. What Mr. Nelson has done here is reassess the near corpse-like rhythms normally associated with Chekhov and calibrate them to the human heart. Indeed, his version of the classic play is infused with an abundance of deep feeling and strips any pretentious residual from the familiar play; yet his traditionally (if vaguely) set staging also maintains the naturalism that marks Chekhov. It’s like one is watching life itself unfold before one’s eyes. As most of us can attest to, there’s nothing languorous about that. It’s a vital experience.

Mr. Nelson’s cast is superlative. In the title role, Jay O. Sanders, a longtime favorite of mine and a veteran of The Apple Family and The Gabriels plays, is just magnificent. His Vanya is not the pathetic and resigned sad old clown prototype that we’ve all come to expect from productions of the play. In his thoughtfully and masterfully considered performance, we see life still pulsing through the character’s veins, and, as a result, we see ourselves in Vanya – through his internalized but profound sense of regret, anger, frustration, and love. His rendition of Vanya’s Act 3 meltdown is one of the most devastating scenes in a play I’ve seen in my recent playgoing. The rest of the cast follows Mr. Sanders (and Mr. Nelson’s) compass, giving this Uncle Vanya an intimate yet emotionally cathartic punch.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

UNCLE VANYA
Off-Broadway, Play
Hunter Theater Project at the Kaye Playhouse
1 hour, 50 minutes (without an intermission)
Through October 14