Dead Letters

In Act I of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Vanya’s mother admonishes her self-pitying son, who’s come to believe he’s wasted his youth on ineffectual principles: “You seem to have forgotten that principles in themselves are nothing, the dead letter... You ought to have been doing things.” We don’t hear this line in Heyman’s distilled Vanya, because the character who speaks it doesn’t appear. This deconstructed “exploration” reduces the play to its four most miserable characters: Vanya, his niece Sonja, her stepmom Yelena, and the doctor, Astrov. In a mixture of Chekhov’s dialogue and fantasy sequences, we see both how these four interact in real life, and those things they’d like to be doing.

There’s a decent chance right now that Stanislavsky is spinning in his grave. We can’t help but wonder what Vanya’s original director, the champion of naturalism and arguably the inventor of subtext, would think about Chekhov’s characters laying out their subconscious for us in such fanciful ways. He needn’t worry, though, as Heyman’s take successfully provides us with new insights on these four characters. By stripping out those characters she deems to have less impact on the emotional lives of the central four, we’re able to focus on previously unconsidered motivations. The casting of four young actors in roles of varying ages works better than we’d expect, reinforcing the guttural, adolescent nature of our lustful, sensual sides. And Heyman’s intimate staging in nontraditional spaces is visually arresting, full of unexpected surprises and strewn with crumpled blueprints that suggest characters’ best-laid plans gone awry.—Kris Vire