Uncle Vanya
Broadway review by Adam Feldman The fraying country estate where Uncle Vanya unfolds is peopled, in the main, by thwarted souls. Its characters wallow in regret, especially the loveless Vanya (Steve Carell). He has sacrificed his money and time, and what he believes to have been his great potential—”I could have been a Schopenhauer, or a Dostoevsky,” he sputters—to support his pompous brother-in-law, Alexander (Alfred Molina), an academic who once enjoyed a great reputation. But now, in middle age, Vanya feels that his reverence for the professor was misplaced. His dutiful work has taken him nowhere, and now he has nowhere to go. Uncle Vanya is set in Russia at the end of the 19th century, but it is perhaps the Chekhov play that feels closest to 21st-century sensibilities, and it is sometimes strikingly prescient of today’s concerns: Vanya’s doctor friend Astrov (William Jackson Harper), for example, is an environmentalist who plants trees to replace those mowed down by industrial loggers, and his artwork paints a worrisome picture of impending “total obliteration.” It’s relatable. There is logic, then, to the decision to dispense with fidelity to Chekhov’s period and update the play to a contemporary setting for Lincoln Center Theater's new production, adapted by Heidi Schreck and directed by Lila Neugebauer. To some extent, the gambit succeeds: Many of the production’s most pleasurable moments are connected to this modernization. But it’s also, I think, where the producti