15 December 2002: Chekhov, Uncle Vanya
American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge. Translated by Paul Schmidt. Directed by János Szász. (Opened 30 November)
The opening production of the 2002-03 season, the first under the new troika of directors: Robert Woodruff, Artistic Director; Robert J. Orchard, Executive Director; and Gideon Lester, Associate Artistic Director.
Szász, a Hungarian, has brought a point of view all his own to this play, an irreverent, no-holds-barred engagement with what he evidently sees as the robust common humanity underlying the familiar sense of profound autonomy and despair that we have always found to be Chekhov’s familiar stock in trade, in his major plays and in the chiefest of their predecessors, Ivanov. As in that play, there is a Hamlet figure in each of the plays that follow. In this play it is of course the title character, who shares his gloomy predecessor’s name —Ivan — familiarized to Vanya. Unlike many productions of this play, the title character does not stand in the limelight. Instead, Szász has wrought a vivacious ensemble, trading any sense of pervasive ennui for a highly physical production in which much physical touching occurs — and much emotive vitality is in evidence. (The extended growling and barking contest indulged in by Astrov and Vanya, in which their open mouths are a scant inch away from each other, seems not at all out of place.) Everything in this production is basic, elemental, animalistic, even to the extent of Astrov, in the last act, groping Yelena’s genitals and breasts.
I actually liked this production a lot, except for the very end. Vanya, alone on stage after the Professor and Yelena have departed and the rest of the characters have gone to see them off, is moved to attempt suicide with the rope that has been used to tie the various account and record books into a bundle. The books lie strewn on the floor, as Vanya mounts a chair, ties one end of the rope to the chandelier, makes a noose in the other end and tightens it around his neck, and then, losing courage to kick the chair out from under him, unties the rope. (There is no hint of this, as I recall, in the script.) The others then come back, Vanya and Sonya sit together at the downstage table and begin to do the accounts.
In still another gesture of despair, Vanya does some rapid-fire business with a rubber stamp, stamping pages innumerable times until he runs out of energy and is quieted by Sonya. So far, so good. But then Marina enters with a huge pot, followed by Waffles and various other hangers-on. They gather in a circle downstage of the table. The pot is opened and its smell savored: it is dumplings, which they all begin to devour. This picks up on Waffles’s earlier comment that it has been ages since they had dumplings. As this goes on, the most soulful, ringing Russian music, with mandolins and balalaikas galore, swept over us. My companion said afterwards, “We might as well have had Laura’s theme.” Suddenly I had a glimp