Uncle Vanya, 08 May 2024

It may have been my imagination, because Broadway’s current Uncle Vanya takes place at Lincoln Center Theater just a building away from the Met Opera, but Heidi Schreck ‘s new version of this Chekhov classic felt like it largely belonged to another genre. If it had been sung instead of spoken, I would have fully believed I was attending an opera. It’s been a while since I have seen Uncle Vanya performed and I have never read the play, so I don’t know how much of this quality was this particular version verses Chekhov’s original intention—nonetheless it is very powerful and effective.

I have long said that the primary difference between opera and musical theatre is that in musical theatre, the characters step through a story while talking mostly to each other. Musical theatre is action oriented. Characters try several ways to solve a problem, go on a journey, and grow. In opera, characters mostly talk to themselves. They reveal their innermost psychological disturbances and uncensored feelings, and although they are often onstage with the characters they’re thinking about, they’re not having a conversation. They’re standing in a situation and explaining how they feel. That’s very much what I felt was happening in this new version of Uncle Vanya.

There wasn’t a whole lot of plot in this story until the tail end of the second act. For the most part, the characters existed separately in the same place. Their feelings and thoughts on each other were known from their voice inflection more than from the actual words that they spoke. In the transitions between scenes, they all moved around each other with purpose, but seemed unaware that they were not alone on stage. Everyone laid their heart bare in one way or another, and yet nobody’s feelings resonated with any of the other characters. Half the time, no one even noticed.

I started to see a familiar cast of opera tropes as Uncle Vanya reached its climax. Uncle Vanya (Steve Carell) could be Figaro in The Barber of Seville. I could easily find a place for Sonia (Allison Pill) in a production of Eugene Onegin. It’s not hard to imagine Elena (Anika Noni Rose) stepping into the world of Carmen, where she has romantic wants that are misplaced and ultimately the strength to refuse and walk away. And of course, Astrov (William Jackson Harper)’s playing with the love of a child and the attraction to an adult—Pinkerton (Madama Butterfly).

I had the realization that some of these stories were Chekhov’s classics, in a way. They’ve all been told and retold in literature dozens of time. Chekhov has always had a propensity for the psychological and the emotional over telling stories with a lot of action and a lot of interpersonal processing. It’s all intrapersonal with Chekhov. The situation is clear to the audience, but unclear to the characters. They fumble, they lose each other, of course there’s gun shots and plans for suicide and desperate yelling into a void where no one can hear. And at the end nothing is accomplished except more suffering. That sounds operatic to me.

I’ve never seen a straight play that was really structured this way, and I got so bogged down in these dazzling comparisons and the idea that a play could be written this way, that I forgot to think about the design elements (I think they were nice) and the specifics of the acting (I know it was good). I was mesmerized by the way this was written and the way Lila Neugebauer directed and architected all of the disconnect and passionate inner thoughts. There were moments where I felt almost every character and saw their place both deriving from and creating other methods of storytelling. Uncle Vanya at the Vivian Beaumont was worth every penny, and even though the story itself is vaguely defined, the passion and the dissonance and its place in the world of art is undeniable, and as triumphant and glorious as any opera I’ve ever seen in the exquisite building a stone’s throw away.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.