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.
Carell is clearly at home with the play’s humor, no small thing since Chekhov tells us he’s written a comedy. But Carell doesn’t offer much beyond those laughs. His Vanya is a sardonic jokester who never convinces me that he has deeper longings, deeper disappointments.
Vanya is always a faintly ridiculous character, whether he is haplessly flirting with Yelena or trying to shoot his brother-in-law or insisting that he could have been a Schopenhauer or a Dostoevsky. But his suffering must exist alongside his clownishness, and Carell never quite puts down his own joking mask to reveal what lies underneath. His performance is a bit too much like the malaise of a well-to-do New Yorker talking to his therapist.
William Jackson Harper, a charming Chidi Anagonye in The Good Place, brings that appeal to Doctor Astrov. But his hectic charm falls short of the charisma needed to make us believe that both Sonya and Yelena would fall for this depressive doctor. And his concern for the destruction of the forests feels rather too much like a neurotic obsession. Astrov as simply neurotic is a reasonable choice, but not an especially interesting one. Common as neuroticism is—I speak from experience!—it feels like pretty small potatoes for a role that, at its best, is prophetic.
The doctor, like everyone else in this play, is trapped, but he sees the trap better than most. His despair at the destruction of the land moves us when it feels grand, existential—and environmental degradation should feel existential to us today. Similarly, his hope that future generations will have figured out how to be happy also grips us when we understand the stakes of that hope, and how readily hope turns into despair.
And then there’s Sonya. Alison Pill, another talented actor, has chosen, or been misdirected, to play her as an energetic and athletic young woman. Is this to give a female character more apparent agency? If so, the cost is far more than the gain. Her Sonya is too confident for us to believe that her heart can be broken by the unattainable Astrov. Nor does this self-confidence sit easily with the compassion and religious faith Sonya finds to comfort both herself and her uncle at the end of the play.
Sadly, nothing about this final scene works. Carell has not given us enough emotional depth for us to feel Vanya’s need for comfort, nor has Sonya shown that she has the spiritual resources that would lend her faith in God’s grace, the great pity that will enfold the world and its sorrows, and the divine promise of rest.
In fact, Sonya doesn’t provide comfort at all to Vanya in this scene. Instead, she finally shows her own grief: she breaks down before delivering her famous monologue, seemingly to herself, as Carell’s Vanya places a hand on her shoulder and looks on with little discernible feeling of his own.
The most beautiful, most heartbreaking monologue in Chekhov lands with a thud.
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