Uncle Vanya – Brooklyn Academy of Music
Opening Night: April 7, 2010
Closing: April 11, 2010
Theater: BAM Harvey Theater
The Maly Drama Theatre and Dodin celebrate the 150th anniversary of Chekhov’s birth with his enduring tragicomedy Uncle Vanya, infusing this masterwork with remorse, sorrow, and bittersweet yearning. Embodying the fraught emotions and restive tenor of their characters, the highly attuned actors deliver every gesture, every utterance—even silence—to humorous and devastating effect.
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April 9, 2010
The fog of repression that smothers many American or British productions of Chekhov’s plays is absent from the Maly Drama Theater’s emotionally unbridled staging of “Uncle Vanya,” which can be seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater through Sunday. Commemorating the 150th anniversary of Chekhov’s birth with an international tour, this venerable Russian company, led by Lev Dodin, brings us a savory taste of that country’s most celebrated playwright in the stinging flavors rarely seen on our shores. There is flinty, funny life in these chronically unsatisfied aristocrats absorbed in complaints about their wasted hopes and bleak futures, if only they had the wisdom to see it.
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April 8, 2010
The Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg is providing an illuminating, and sometimes even revelatory, staging of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, now in a brief run at BAM’s Harvey Theatre. Director Lev Dodin uncovers not only what theatergoers have always known is inherent in the classic play — a warm, yet sometimes bittersweet humor that’s mixed with a keenly felt sadness — but also some tantalizing new insights into characters that have become exceedingly familiar to seasoned theatergoers.
READ THE REVIEWApril 13, 2010
Uncle Vanya consists of a series of interchanges showing the disruptive effect of a summer visit by an ailing Professor and his young wife Yelena to the country estate he inherited from his first wife and managed by Sonya, his daughter from that marriage, and her Uncle Vanya. The social, cultural and romantic repercussions of that visit affect the entire household which, besides Vanya and Sonya, includes Vanya’s mother, a tea-pouring and wisdom spouting old Nanny and the doctor called to treat the Professor’s gout whose housecall lasts until the end of the play.
READ THE REVIEWApril 13, 2010
When he takes on Anton Chekhov’s plays, the master Russian director Lev Dodin doesn’t worry about unearthing new aspects of the beloved dramatist. After all, the author left only a handful of full-length dramas when he died in 1904, and Russian stagings are as common as birch trees in the forest. "The important thing is not to set your heart on making new discoveries," he tells the Voice through a translator, "but to hope to God that you and your actors might be able to measure up to his scale of thoughts and emotions."
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February 23, 2009
Finally, Uncle Vanya at the CSC offers an all-star cast, but an off-kilter production. In this revival, Chekov gets short-changed. The play is powerful: Vanya (Denis O’Hare) suddenly realizes that his life has been futile, wasted in the service of ingrates who neither know nor care about his sacrifice. Chekov, a master of destroyed dreams and eternal longing, has set his story at an estate populated by a sterile, controlling academic, fawning mother-in-law, disappointed young wife and spirited idealist.
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