Uncle Vanya: The sitcom!

Berkeley Rep’s audacious production——first funny, then passionate— of Chekhov’s normally melancholy classic is a gamble that pays off.

If there’s one thing you don’t expect at a Chekhov play, it’s a yukfest. The great Russian playwright is the master of presenting shattered dreams, doomed destinies, and incalculable losses, all taking place as everyday life proceeds with all its banal politeness. Marked by profound compassion, Chekhov’s plays have extraordinary emotional depth, but the flip side of that is that they can be emotionally narrow, and their omnipresent tone of melancholy can feel like a cliché. I cannot be the person watching a production of The Three Sisters who, with full recognition of Chekhov’s towering humanity and sublime artistry, has had to suppress a little voice saying, “Just go to fucking Moscow already!”

Director Simon Godwin’s first-rate production of Uncle Vanya at the Berkeley Repertory Theater (a co-production with Shakespeare Theater Company), avoids this “Anton-is-crying-in-his-vodka-again” problem, and makes the play feel fresh, by making an audacious choice: making it first funny, then openly tragic. Just how audacious this directorial approach was became extra clear to me because I re-read the play a few hours before seeing the show. I can assure you that there is very little in Chekhov’s script that even remotely resembles a laff riot. And insofar as one might laugh, it would be at the script, not with it. I personally love the weird, and to me, deeply Russian, way that Chekhov’s characters are always opening casual conversations by saying things like, “My life has become completely purposeless and empty since I moved to the country.” No “how’s the weather today?” for them! They get right to the existential point! Then they do it again! And again! This incessant, searing honesty gives Uncle Vanya its unique Chekhovian intensity, but it’s undeniably strange, and can inspire ridicule. Chekhov is a great naturalist, but it’s naturalism on truth serum, and its weirdness and darkness can prevent audiences from fully appreciating his art.

Godwin opens his production by tearing down the fourth wall, showing the actors milling around on stage and wandering into the audience. This effective device disorients us, letting us know this is not going to be a polite period piece. Then he takes Chekhov’s sad and lost band of characters and gives them so much life force, energy and humor that you have to remind yourself that you’re watching Chekhov. Hilariously, their constant complaining starts to feel almost meta and self-referential, like a Yiddish-y comedic shtick a la Rodney Dangerfield: “I tell you, I don’t get no respect!” This is especially true in the first half of the play, when it makes more sense: if the second half was equally comedic, the play wouldn’t work. In the second half, Godwin uses the same defamiliarizing strategy, but this time goes the other way: humor is replaced by more emotional intensity, even verging on melodrama, than is customary with interpretations of Chekhov. The most glaring example of this is the climactic thwarted love scene between Doctor Astrov and Elena, the unhappily (of course) married woman who loves Astrov just as he loves her, but is (of course) prevented by propriety from acting on her love. While she is telling Astrov she cannot be with him, Elena suddenly utters a loud and heart-rending sob. There’s nothing about this in the stage directions, and the conventional reading of her character is far more restrained.

This two-stage approach could have led to a slight sense of watching two different plays. But Godwin’s direction is so assured, and the acting—from Hugh Bonneville’s tousled, irascible and heartbroken Vanya to John Benjamin Hickey’s self-assured, lost Astrov to Ito Aghayere’s controlled but suffering Elena—is so uniformly excellent, that it doesn’t happen.

In the end, Godwin’s first comedic, then passionate, version leads us to the same wondrous place of compassion for sad and suffering human beings as more conventional readings of Chekhov, with their omnipresent melancholy tone. This Uncle Vanya is a first-rate demonstration of how creative directing can make a classic work feel new, while preserving the artistic greatness that make it timeless.

Uncle Vanya plays at Berkeley Repertory Theater through March 23. For tickets and calendar: https://tickets.berkeleyrep.org/events?k=unclevanya&hidedate