Why can’t we ever get enough of Uncle Vanya?
What is it about Anton Chekhov’s incessantly complaining, self-pitying sad sack that makes him return anew to the theater more than any other dramatic protagonist maybe short of Hamlet, that other great melancholy inaction hero?
The question has grown more pressing in the last two years, since there have been four new revivals of “Uncle Vanya” in New York alone and another starring Hugh Bonneville that finished an acclaimed run at Shakespeare Theater in Washington earlier this month.
Last year, the playwright Jon Robin Baitz argued that the play was in vogue partly because it was a “study of post-Covid paralysis.” But “Uncle Vanya” is always in fashion. I have seen 15 different versions in the last three decades, and I have come to believe that its enduring popularity is because of its flexibility.
The old argument about whether “Uncle Vanya” — which follows a series of emotional disasters that occur on a Russian country estate run by Vanya and his niece, Sonya — is a comedy or a tragedy misses the point. There’s no one right way to perform it. I’ve seen it done funny and gloomy, cerebral and physical, small scale and broadly theatrical. What’s most remarkable about the play is how it can sustain so many different approaches and still move audiences.
Look at the actors who have played the title character in the past year. There’s a world of difference between Andrew Scott, the star of the series “Ripley,” and the comedian Steve Carell; between the defeated, passive man played by the Tony-winning theater director David Cromer and the aggressively cranky Bob Laine from the Brooklyn adaptation by the “Dimes Square” playwright Matthew Gasda.