All this is remarkable, and most likely the reason Scott and the London production won several major awards last year. The technical elements are exemplary, yet not a dollar showier than they need to be. (The spare set is by Rosanna Vize, the cool lights by James Farncombe, the marvelous sound by Dan Balfour.) And though Scott never changes his outfit — gray pants, teal short-sleeve shirt, white sneakers, by Natalie Pryce — you may find, later, that your memory has provided him with a full closet of 19th-century costumes.
But all that skill (and the chance to see it at close range in a 295-seat Off Broadway theater) is only part of what makes this “Vanya” so good. If Scott were merely adept at the switcheroo illusions — playing two halves of a conversation simultaneously, shooting at someone and being shot — the Chekhov would be charming but not, as great theater requires, new. Indeed, a “regular” production of “Uncle Vanya” with eight cloned Scotts doing eight separate things is not something I’d expect to enjoy as much as I did seeing one do all of it together.
What makes the production exemplary, like the play itself, is the emotion. I hate to think why Scott is such a sadness machine, but the tears (and blushes and glows and sneers) lie very shallow under his skin. He only rarely raises his voice. As the feelings are evidently coming directly and carefully from his heart, he narrowcasts them directly and carefully at yours. In that way he makes even the production’s few missteps feel inevitable, as when the heartbroken Ivan sings the 1959 torch song “If You Go Away.” Who knew that Chekhov wrote it?
I’ve by now seen so many updated adaptations of “Uncle Vanya” (and “The Seagull,” “The Cherry Orchard” and “Three Sisters”) that despite those productions’ general inferiority, they’re beginning to crowd out the originals. This “Vanya” is a reset. As strange as it is in conception, in performance it’s the best I’ve seen. Collecting Ivan and Helena and Michael and Sonia and the rest in one body, and filtering their emotions through one sensibility, does something odd: It makes of the characters an uber-character, with the widest possible range of human feeling, experience, intelligence and foolishness. You may feel, as I did, that in meeting that crowded congregation through Scott, you have finally met Chekhov himself.
Vanya
Through May 11 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; lortel.org. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.
