Scott Cordes and Hillary Clemens in Uncle Vanya (Brian Paulette)
Anton Chekhov doesn’t get enough credit for being hilarious. When most people think of his plays, they likely think of bleak family dramas. And his work is full of grim and fervent despair, of course, but it’s also, generally speaking, extremely funny. Richard Nelson’s 2018 adaptation (translated by Nelson, Richard Pevear, and Larissa Volokhonsky) puts the humor of the play right out front—the humor and the despair, in nearly equal measure.
In Uncle Vanya, now running at Kansas City Actors Theatre, the characters spend their days feeling bored or otherwise unfulfilled, moping, and lamenting the injustices that have caused them such unhappiness. The titular Vanya (Scott Cordes) has spent decades working the farm at his late sister’s estate, eking out little profit and mourning what his life could have been. The local doctor, Astrov (Jerry Mañan), has grown bored with his country life while developing a near-obsession with the state of the environment. Both men are in love with Elena (Chioma Anyanwu), who is herself living a life of boredom and idleness because she’s so beautiful that she doesn’t have to actually do anything.
To round things out, Sonya (Hillary Clemens), Vanya’s niece who runs the estate with her uncle, is in all-consuming and unreciprocated love with Astrov. Her father, the family patriarch, and Yelena’s elderly husband, Serebryakov (Victor Raider-Wexler), is in increasingly poor health. He’s more concerned, though, with his extreme boredom now that he has been relegated to living at his country estate full-time. When he finally gets the idea to sell the estate and downsize abroad, it sends Vanya into a rage.
Nelson’s adaptation is a brisk one hour and 45 minutes. Compressing the characters’ languorous struggles into such a compact package puts them into a pressure cooker, making the tensions and grievances feel even more oppressive. When Vanya snaps, you can feel the weight of a lifetime of sacrifice leading to the moment. Scenic designer John Rohr’s sparse stage offers no comfort to the characters, and the empty space amplifies their sense of discontent.
Nearly every character in Uncle Vanya is obsessed with someone else, but everyone is too hyper-focused on their own despair to make a genuine connection with another person. Some of the pairings suffer from a disappointing lack of chemistry, but in general, the failure to connect is the point, and the cast does a solid job of operating in their own individual, parallel emotional silos. (Clemens especially is a tragic joy to watch as her Sonya pines and frets, overanalyzing every moment of her interactions with Astrov.)
Under the direction of Matt Schawder, KCAT’s Uncle Vanya is a stellar, faithful production of a classic, and Nelson’s adaptation is fresh enough that even audiences who are especially familiar with the play are likely to find it wholly engaging.
“Uncle Vanya,” a production of Kansas City Actors Theatre, runs through August 24 at City Stage, on the lower level of Union Station, 30 W Pershing Rd, Kansas City, MO. For more information, visit www.kcactors.org.
