On a late winter morning, the cast of the new production of Uncle Vanya, starring Steve Carell and directed by Lila Neugebauer, begins to arrive at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York’s Lincoln Center. The actors—Carell, Alfred Molina, Anika Noni Rose, William Jackson Harper, Alison Pill, Jayne Houdyshell, Mia Katigbak, and Jonathan Hadary—had recently assembled for a read-through of the script, a new adaptation by Heidi Schreck of the Anton Chekhov masterwork, but this morning’s gathering for Vogue marks the true beginning of their journey together. They loiter around a catering table and introduce themselves. Rehearsals begin tomorrow and the play opens in April.
“A great director, a great translation, and a classic play, those three things,” says Carell, are what drew him to Vanya. “The play also feels current and speaks to human behavior that hasn’t changed in a hundred years,” he adds. “Chekhov nails down the essence of how human beings think, and talk, and react, and feel the life around them.”
Uncle Vanya is indeed an astonishingly modern play, with its meditations on money, class, work, the environment, and masculinity. But it’s also profoundly human in its themes: the finitude of life, lost dreams, and unrequited love. It cuts so deeply because “the dilemmas are of the heart, and completely comprehensible,” says Hadary, the veteran New York stage actor who plays Waffles. “They are not characters in a play. They’re people. They’re us.” Carell concurs: “They’re just so specifically drawn that they feel absolutely real and lived-in.” He pauses, gathering his thoughts on the playwright. “I mean, the guy was a genius.”
Uncle Vanya was first staged at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1899 by the impresario Konstantin Stanislavski, who, as the founder of the performance process called the Method, changed acting forever. Chekhov considered his plays comedies, drolly complaining in his letters that Stanislavski’s original production missed the humor in Uncle Vanya. But the play is both: a comedy about misunderstandings and misconstruals (“They’re always saying the wrong things to the wrong people,” Carell observes), and a tragedy about lives wasted—or stalled in a holding pattern.
Here is the story: A vain, pompous professor, Serabryakov (Molina), retires to “his” (the quotation marks are crucial) 26-room country estate with his second wife, Yelena (Rose). Their arrival disturbs the peace (or inertia) of the household: Resentments are aired, passions are inflamed, rages are unearthed. The professor announces his intention to sell, but the estate, we learn, is not his—it belongs to Sonya (Pill), his adult daughter from his first marriage. Sonya and her uncle Vanya function as the managers of the estate, where Vanya’s feminist mother, Mama Voinitski (Houdyshell), a nanny named Marina (Katigbak), and a guitar-plucking family friend (Hadary)—the aforementioned Waffles—also live. Astrov (Harper), a local doctor, environmentalist, depressive, and probable alcoholic rounds out the cast.
We have complicated feelings about each of them. They are all, as Molina says, “terribly, infuriatingly human”: They’re emotionally stunted, they mock and belittle and use each other as scapegoats, yet they are, ultimately, good-hearted and (like all of us) trapped in cycles of self-destruction and self-deception. In the play’s climactic scene, one of the more famous in theater history, Vanya loses his mind, gets a gun, fires (twice) at the professor, whom he blames—unfairly—for all the injustices he believes plague him, including, apparently, a failed writing career. (“I could have been a Schopenhauer,” he howls, “a Dostoevsky.”) Says Carell: “He’s created this world of illusion for himself to get by. And then when he actually can’t even create the illusion, it’s heartbreaking.”
What follows are questions about how to live with shame, regret, and grief, about how to continue existing when the dream of life has been deferred. “The final battle of the play is getting to a place of acceptance that does not feel resigned,” says Pill. “The message is that you have to actively accept your circumstances at every point and not just resign yourself to them. Even though, from the outside, acceptance and resignation may look very alike.”
Last year, Neugebauer, who has led a series of riveting productions, including Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s current Broadway hit, Appropriate, was invited to direct a play at Lincoln Center Theater. She and André Bishop, the organization’s producing artistic director, discovered a shared love of Chekhov. “I suddenly felt that Vanya had everything to say to me about my own life,” says Neugebauer, “which I’ve learned is a bit of a pattern with Chekhov plays and aging.” Neugebauer is just 38 but adds, “I guess I’ve now lived long enough for the play to break my heart.” She knew she wanted to collaborate on an adaptation with Schreck, whose 2019 play What the Constitution Means to Me was the most produced show in American theaters last fall. Schreck and Neugebauer have known each other since a 2008 production in Louisville, Kentucky, of A Christmas Carol; later, they lived in the same Brooklyn brownstone.
There are four major Chekhov plays—The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Three Sisters, and Uncle Vanya—all written toward the end of the Russian master’s remarkable life. (He died in 1904 at 44, after years of chronic illness from tuberculosis.) Vanya, however, is the one that has recently percolated through the culture. The 2021 Japanese film Drive My Car follows a widowed theater actor and director as he stages Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. Other recent productions include last fall’s one-man National Theatre adaptation with Andrew Scott in London and a brilliant 2020 West End production adapted by playwright Conor McPherson. Another well-regarded Vanya, starring David Cromer, was staged last year in a Manhattan loft.
Although Schreck is fluent in Russian (in the ’90s, she worked as a journalist in St. Petersburg), she collaborated with interpreter Tatyana Khaikin to create a new translation. The pair spent hours parsing every word, and the result is a universal yet Americanized language—compacted and pared down, warm and accessible. The setting, too, is near-future America, and the play does feel unnervingly timely. Chekhov wrote Vanya in the period between the emancipation of the serfs and the Russian Revolution, and there is a deep sense of unease underlying the action. The surrounding forests are being destroyed, the rivers are drying up, animals are dying, peasants are rummaging through the compost heap and banging on the front door. “The world is on fire around them,” says Schreck, “and they don’t know how to deal with that fact.”
For the Tony Award–winning Rose, Uncle Vanya speaks to our present moment because “as a society, we’ve been so stunted. We’ve been trying to figure out: Where do we go now? How do we pick everything back up?” Schreck and Neugebauer have increased the ages of several of the characters and given greater prominence to a local teenager named Yefim, played here by Spencer Donovan Jones. The presence of this very young person takes on a powerful resonance: How will future generations judge the lives of these characters?
At the center of it all, of course, is Vanya—and Carell became the person Schreck heard in her head as she wrote this version. “We thought he should be honestly funny,” she says. “But always with the best actors, there is also a glimpse of a wound.” Neugebauer agrees: “I’ve always felt that his comedy actually comes from a deep well of sadness. Steve is an extremely well-adjusted person in life—but in his work, I’ve always felt that his humor is deeply rooted in his humanity.”
And who is Vanya? Bitter, sarcastic, cynical, defensive, lazy, self-mocking, and self-protective. Vanya makes shabby little excuses for all his failures. It is impossible for him to be happy. But he’s also deeply intelligent, funny, sweet, courageous, and, ultimately, heroic. “I think, at his core, he is a very decent person,” Carell says. “A very kind person. He was inspired and full of life, full of thought and passion.” Carell, Neugebauer says, embodied all the qualities she and Schreck thought of when they thought of Vanya: “Who is a person, even in their most self-deprecating, even in perhaps self-pitying and self-lacerating moments, I would still want to be around?”
Back to the theater: This is the first time the actors have seen their dressing rooms. The rooms are narrow—a table with an illuminated mirror above it and a long red upholstered bench on the other side. On many of the actors’ desks are binders with Schreck’s script. At this early stage, they are experimenting, pondering, posing questions. Katigbak, a downtown theater veteran and cofounder of the National Asian American Theatre Company who is making her Broadway debut as Marina, observes that her character seems to treat everyone like a child. The legendary character actress Houdyshell, who plays Vanya’s mother, says, “I think she’s quite dominant and domineering. She’s a very independent woman, and an ardent feminist.” How disappointed, Houdyshell asks, is her character in Vanya for not picking up the torch of political activism? Molina wonders if his character, the professor, who has clearly been forced into retirement, had been, in our contemporary term, canceled? Had Yelena, God forbid, been his student?
“Astrov talks about numbness,” says Harper of the doctor character, “which is something I’ve found myself feeling a lot—dread about what happens later.” Astrov, like Chekhov, has a deep reverence for the natural world; he is a romantic, yet he is also the most clinical and detached. In a state of despair, Vanya asks Astrov how he can start over. “What new life?” Astrov replies in Schreck’s script. “No new life is coming, not for us.” For a time Harper thought about giving up acting: “There’s something about being an adult, where the chance of turning your life into something else is less and less likely.”
The cast has been called for the photo. They crowd into an elevator and ascend to the bright theater lobby. A broad corridor with a panoramic view of Lincoln Center leads to a windowed rehearsal room where an assortment of props have been assembled. A member of the production crew announces, “Last looks!” and everyone is suddenly very still. It’s possible no one is actually breathing.
Molina asks, genially, “Do you want us to give you any kind of mood?”
“Yes!” says Pill. “Are we all Serious Vanya?”
Or are they Funny Vanya?
The answer could go either way. Uncle Vanya, of course, is both.
Hair, Lacy Redway; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi.