Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Vanya is a love story.  Not between any of Chekhov’s characters but between Andrew Scott and the play.  His passion for it leads him to share it with us in a great rush of enthusiasm.  As you probably have heard, Scott plays all of the characters.  The main task of doing a solo show featuring multiple characters is to individuate them so the audience can keep them straight, particularly in passages featuring quick exchanges. Scott more than pulls this off.  Sometimes he shifts characters for a wordless reaction and we can track who is reacting to whom and why.  The technique is dazzling, and much of the evening is deeply funny.

But I think this is a production that best rewards those of us who already know Uncle Vanya pretty well.  I would be interested to debrief someone who came to this without already having made the acquaintance elsewhere of Vanya, Astrov, Yelena, Sonia and the self-important fraud who (in this version) is a washed-up filmmaker.  I have my doubts that they would track the story clearly if this were their introduction to it.  But then, looking at the audience when I attended (filled with press and theater professionals) my guess is nobody around me hadn’t seen at least one of the recent productions featuring Jay O. Sanders, Steve Carrell and David Cromer. (Not to mention Aaron Posner’s delightful reworking, Life Sucks.)

Scott is a bone fide star.  Since I first saw him as the floridly malevolent Moriarty confronting Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock, I have marveled at the intensity of his focus, a quality that has served him well interpreting writers as varied as Doyle, Shakespeare, Noel Coward and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.  Here that intensity, radiating for nearly two hours in the intimate Lucille Lortel, is the basis of an evening that never slackens.  I half expected to emerge from from the theater with a tan. If you can score a ticket without having to sell blood …