Theater, New York

On a recent Thursday in New York, I had an odd experience transitioning from my matinee (The 25th Annual Putnam Spelling Bee) to my evening show (Liberation). What was so odd was that these two wildly different shows were both set in that quintessentially American public space: a high school gym.

The resemblance between The 25^th Annual Putnam Spelling Bee and Liberation largely ends there. Still, the shared setting says something a bit depressing about American civic life. Our public architecture is so impoverished that a high school gym has become the default setting for our gatherings, whether spelling bees or consciousness-raising groups—or the knitting circle one of the women in Liberation thought she was attending. I count myself fortunate, in fact, that I was able to see both shows in proper theaters. Small community productions (of Spelling Bee, if not Liberation) might very well take place in high school gyms when their communities lack any dedicated theater space at all.

But what struck me most was how differently these two shows use the same setting—and what that difference reveals about who gets to transform a space, even temporarily, into something of their own. That high school students would gather in their gym for a spelling competition makes sense. In fact, there’s a nice bit of irony there: these nerds, who are no doubt bullied in gym class, get to use that same space to strut their stuff, to show that they, too, can be champions.

But where the gym allows for an empowering reversal in Spelling Bee, it reads quite differently as the meeting place for Lizzie’s consciousness-raising group in small-town Ohio in 1971. These women are gathering in order to establish themselves as autonomous adults, not as afterthoughts in a male-dominated world. That they gather in a gym, largely coded as male and adolescent, only emphasizes how little room there is for them to be themselves.

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In a word, no.

The new Broadway production of Uncle Vanya is still in previews and has a few weeks to work things out. But Carell’s lackluster Vanya is just one of several fundamental problems it may not be able to resolve.

With desultory furniture scattered across the thrust stage of the Vivian Beaumont, the play never really feels as though it inhabits the space. A moody backdrop of birch trees is lovely but also a bit puzzling. Where are we? Not in Chekhov’s Russia. The language and costuming are contemporary American but no more specific than that. (Astrov’s use of the word “freaks” in place of the usual “cranks” calls to mind hippies of the 1960s, but nothing else supports that idea.)

This lack of specificity drains the play of its emotional roots. The story may be one of universal disappointment, but it’s the specificity of this particular disappointment that draws us in, whether it takes place in Russia before the revolution or, as in Andrew Scott’s recent Vanya, in modern Ireland.

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