Acting teachers love Chekhov. The lyricism of the dialogue is appealing. The setting is just enough removed to permit liberality in casting, yet current enough that one isn’t looking up every other word. More than these, the most attractive quality of these scripts is the way they capture our natural fluidity of emotion, the razor’s edge between joy and sorrow.
When played perfectly, an actor’s performance slices through the text so cleanly that we share in the simultaneous laughter and tears. Sub-par performances tend to favor the tears (Gershwin’s gray-skied Russian plays) or push the laughter into discomfiting clowning. Akropolis Performance Lab’s current production of Uncle Vanya (at The Garden House on Beacon Hill through April 5) is inventive and decidedly imperfect.
The story of Uncle Vanya tracks a summer and fall on a provincial estate. With the assistance of his niece, Sonya (Margaetta Campagna) Uncle Vanya (Joseph Lavy, who also directs) manages the estate on behalf of his late sister’s widower, Serebryakov, (Scott Maddock), a hack professor. The professor has arrived from the city to retire with his much younger wife, Elena (Samantha Routh). Their urban habits upset the quiet routines and hard-fought productivity of the farm.
And here’s where this 1897 play gets complex and flirts with the melodramatic. Vanya has fallen in love with Elena. Her step-daughter, Sonya, is in love with Vanya’s friend, Astrov (Carter Rodriguez), a country doctor and conservationist (as was Chekhov). The action takes off when Astrov and Elena find themselves mutually smitten. Jealousies erupt and the whole self-destructive arrangement collapses. Things return to the way they were, but changed.
In the right hands this friction of desire and inertia is the motive force behind the sadness and comedy inherent in Chekhov. It is also a prominent quality in the more austere world of Samuel Beckett. Joseph Lavy and his Akropolis Performance Lab have latched onto this observation. For those who eschew the program notes the first indication comes early in the production in the midst of an a cappella rendering of one of a dozen Russian songs performed in the show. The professor crosses the stage followed by a woman in a bowler, dark glasses and 2/3rds of a suit—bowlers in the theatre mean Beckett the way they mean Magritte in painting.
As if that weren’t enough the Beckettian figure collapses and rises twice for no apparent reason—other than to caption the Beckett/Chekhov congruence. But who is this figure? Could Lucky have escaped the clutches of Pozzo in the land of Godot and taken up following the Professor instead? No, it turns out this is Mrs. Voynitsky (Eva Doak), Vanya’s befuddled, pamphlet-obsessed mother.
This sort of abstraction peppers the production, which never commits to its wild swings of tone but tries to integrate misguided direction and misreading of the text with fine performances from the likes of Rodriguez and Routh.
Taken on their own the abstracted scenes are frequently ingenious. An actor jangles a wind chime of medicine bottles with an umbrella and we know a storm is coming. Those songs create scene changes in a space that feels tailor-made for an environmental staging of the show.
The most successful abstraction involves a blanket sweeping onto the stage to whisk a pair of characters away on an (unjustified) emotional picnic without ever leaving the room. That blanket then carries us into an entirely different scene and tone. However the staging gives no basis for such infrequent disruptions.
Furthermore one gets the impression that abstractions only appear when the director, Lavy, encountered a scene he didn’t fully understand. This denies us the chief pleasures of the play as when Sonya and Elena laugh and cry into a tenuous rapprochement or when Elena and Astrov duel their way into consummation.
The show is excellent at simple melodrama. Heartbreaking romantic scenes between Astrov and Elena, and Astrov and Sonya are the best this production has to offer. Rodriguez only falters in his big scene with Vanya where the director seems to be listening more to himself than his scene partner.
As the sad sack neighbor, Waffles, Sean Patrick Taylor embodies the Chekhovian paradox, though his mild performance all but disappears. As Vanya, Joseph Lavy, exists in an entirely other world of manic energy and pathetic, forced bravado. Zhenya Lavy (as the old nurse, Marina) plays well in the show’s least complex, most straight-forward role. She and Taylor anchor the delightful musical numbers. Campagna is inconsistent while Maddock is consistently awkward and stiff instead of old and frail.
Clearly Akropolis has some excellent tools and bright ideas. They fail in interesting ways and one hopes they’ll learn to use those tools more effectively in the future.
{Uncle Vanya runs through April 5 at the Garden House in Beacon Hill, tickets available here.}