Uncle Vanya

Chekhov's Uncle Vanya is a very thin crust of tension spread over a layer of boredom. A retired professor and his young wife come to their country estate they draw to their circle a country doctor who comes to treat the professor's gout and stays to admire his lady. The life of the estate comes to revolve around this trio; the country people are sucked into shaping their once-tedious lives around the newcomers, until finally, when they depart, those who remain can only sigh again and again, "They're gone."

Thus the director's problem: one must present a succession of languid scenes without permitting one's own pace to become catastrophically slow. The Harvard Summer Players succeed much of the time, enough to make the evening an enjoyable one and to raise the question of why it isn't better.

The problem seems to me to revolve around the multi-leveled plot. Every character has a carefully plotted relationship to every other, a relationship often twisted by family ties and past animosities. If a production succeeds, every line crackles with the meaning behind it; the languid pace becomes for the audience, as it is for the characters, a veil that covers a nest of suspense.

This is all very vague; perhaps it will be clearer if I say that Leonard Baker's Astrov is absolutely the center of attention in this production because he succeeds in making crystal clear his ties with every one of the seven other principals. He is an electric figure; one could almost hear the audience snap up when he came on stage and relax again when he went off.

In a cast of almost stationary people, Baker is a kind of perpetual-motion machine gesturing grimacing, smiling, patting Marina on the back, glowing in his drunkenness and grinning in his sobriety. Much of his business is taken from Chekhov's stage directions; much of it he and director John Black have added, unobtrusively and effectively.

Laurence Senelick's Sebryakov is just as successful, but then his job is easier. He grates on everyone, he demands attention and energy from all, and his presence, like that of a great brooding ogre, hangs over the stage when he is off it. Among the one-dimensional characters, Gloria Maddox's Sofya, and Bruce Kornbluth's Telyegin are well put-together too, (though someone ought to get Kornbluth a balaika and get rid of that Everly Brothers-vintage guitar he's stuck with), and Gertrude Crippen's Marina is excellent.

The process of elimination points the finger rather squarely at K. Lype O'Dell and Marjorie Lerstrom, who, as Vanya and Yelena, are responsible for holding the play together. But from O'Dell one gets only the sense of a dull, complaining man. One does not find in this Vanya the education with which Astrov credits him, nor the profound melancholy the others are constantly pointing out. His philosophy comes out flat; if there is one scene in the play that is disastrously bad it is his soliloquy early in Act II, where, instead of protest at a wasted life we hear the grumbling complaints of a bore.

Miss Lerstrom simply does not seem to be alive to all the intricacies of her part. It is impossible to gather from her behavior in Act I that she and Sofya have been antagonistic--and this must be clear by Act II. She has the same half-smile for Astrov, for Vanya, even for Telyegin, when he protests at her forgetting his name. As a result, her dialogue drags; one feels surprise, instead of quiet uneasiness, when her relations with the others are made clear.

John Anderson has created a very peculiar outdoor set with a tree that looks sugar-coated; his outdoor settings are quietly effective. Lewis Smith's costumes are once again absolutely splendid.