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Perhaps it has to do with a pandemic-adjacent sense of claustrophobia or the relatability of existential crisis.
Like its luckless hero, it shoots and misses.
Because were both such boring, tedious people.
They havent coalesced into engines theyre not living in the actors blood and bones.
Intertwined issues of script, casting, and direction are at work here.
She has also done away with any mention of Russia and with patronymics and diminutives.
What I dont understand is why were still destroying entire forests, insists the environmentally conscious Astrov.
says Vanya, still speaking like a man in 1899.
Neugebauer, however, is presiding over one of the least sexyVanyas Ive ever seen.
Its also something else, something so painful it should take the breath out of us.
Here, like so much else, it doesnt reach our guts.
The performers struggle to connect is also tied to the mise en scene.
Most oppressive of all, when the action moves indoors, Lien flies in a heavy brown wall.
Everything already felt brown, and now the soporific monochrome is complete.
In one moment, Carell leaps up on a table and it makes you blink.
We still dont know how to do Chekhov in this country.
I want to live, insist his characters.We have to live.
Thats not a sigh.
Were still liable to hear boredom and end up with boring.
Uncle Vanyais at the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center Theater.
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