San Antonio's Classic Theatre has opened its second season with a beautifully designed, perceptive and subtly paced production of one of my favorite works, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.
That's the shorthand version of the title. It was published as Uncle Vanya - Scenes from Country Life. Although at the heart of it there sits an eternally frustrated love triangle -- Vanya and Dr. Astrov both yearning for the unhappily married Yelena -- the play contains much, much more.
These scenes from country life contain an uneasy, boozy friendship between Vanya (John Minton) and Dr. Astrov (Anthony Ciaravino). Vanya and his niece Sonya (Laura Darnell) have spent long years managing the estate so as to finance the studies and urban living expenses of Sonya's father Serebryakov. Serebryakov (Allan S. Ross) has now retired to the estate, gout-ridden, cranky and self-important, after a mediocre academic career. We see relatively little of him, but we see a lot of his current wife Yelena (Emily Spicer) , who is scarcely older than his daughter Sonya.
As in all of Chekhov's dramas, we listen to conversations about the dissatisfactions of rural life, discussions of frustrated ideals and idle speculations about the future. His characters are as vivid as life but anything but heroic -- they are, instead, tentative, indecisive and yearning, perhaps the first in theatrical history to portray those very modern qualities.
Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .
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