Review: 'Uncle Vanya' on Broadway leaves a talented cast stranded

NEW YORK — Filled with sad-sack characters living lives of soul-sucking boredom, Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” ain’t ever a walk in the park to produce or, for that matter, to watch.

Still, the new Lincoln Center production from the typically reliable director Lila Neugebauer is so disconnected and alienating that, frankly, I spend most of the production wondering how on Earth such a collection of famous, talented actors — Steve Carell, Alfred Molina, Anika Noni Rose, Jayne Houdyshell, Alison Pill, for goodness sake— had so failed to cohere. Did something go wrong?

In Chekhov, that’s always an existential kind of question. He remains the great poet of missed opportunity, the bard of the late-in-life realization that everything one has achieved has been of little importance, the prophet of the traps of moving to the country (watch out!) or of living your life in service of one with a giant ego like Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov, the retired university professor entirely convinced of his own importance.

Molina, relentlessly and yet deliciously loquacious, has the unexamined life down cold. But that’s about the only performance that feels fully secure here, mostly because this is a character utterly oblivious to the needs of other human beings.

Elsewhere, it feels like others in the cast are all living in their own little pools of life-light on the giant Lincoln Center stage, with a design from Mimi Lien that might look quite lovely but, alas, de-emphasizes the human traffic on the stage.

You feel like you are watching nine different performances in nine different shows. Laughs are few and far between, even though they are typically a staple of this particular drama, the relief they offer being crucial to its themes.

Frankly, when the most interesting moment is when it rains on stage and your eyes go to the drainage mechanism rather than anyone’s ecstasy or soggy despair, that’s not an especially good sign.

Part of the issue here is Heidi Schreck’s translation, which somehow doesn’t pull people together enough, even though that’s the director’s job, too. It’s a wry and smart adaptation, in places, but it doesn’t land either as an overtly contemporary interpretation nor something trying to amplify the era of the 1895 play. Indeed, temporal confusion is one of the main problems here. Kaye Voyce’s costumes read as contemporary, mostly, but that fights the lines the characters are speaking and most certainly the setting. “Uncle Vanya” never works without a strong, clear point of view and this one is just too hard to track.

I’m partial to Annie Baker’s much funnier translation of this play (seen at the Goodman Theatre in 2017) because Baker knew how to connect the Russian text to its absurdist roots: Uncle Vanya is not that different, really, from some Seattle slacker who wakes up one day to find that the years have been flowing by without much achieved and that the hipster garb doesn’t so look so hot in middle age. The Curt Columbus version is cool, too. This new one does not make a case for itself.

Some of the performances have their moments: Pill’s Sonya is an empathetic creation, even if she spends so much time moving around the stage, she’s hard for an audience to pin down. Jonathan Hadary, one of the great unsung actors of his generation, is tonally apt as Waffles. Other performers perk up for moments and potent scenes, only to disappear back down as nothing fully builds.

Carell’s title character, he shows us, is angry with his situation. Sure, Uncle Vanya is having no fun. But that emotion only takes you so far within the context of the play and Carell misses the point of the most important speech of all, which is when Vanya fights the battle we all try and win as we age: the one between realizing how much time we have wasted while realizing that we have to pretend otherwise to actually be able to live alongside other people.

This gifted star falls into the trap of the comic actor in a tragicomic part: he plays up the tragic bit but kinda forgets why he was cast in the first place.

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At the Vivian Beaumont Theater in the Lincoln Center for the Arts, 150 W. 65th St., New York; www.lct.org.

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