THEATER


Pearl Theater
Uncle Vanya - Anton Chekhov

We're headed back to the small, off-broadway theater!

Read the final sentence in the review by the New York Times.  "Sadness" and "emptiness"...

Synopsis: 

The arrival of a worldly professor and his bewitching wife have shattered the drowsy peace of Vanya and Sonya’s country estate. In a series of flirtations, disappointments, confessions, and revelations, this motley collection of parochial nobodies demand their moment in the sun—but never seem to know what to do when they get it. Quietly powerful, slyly comic, Uncle Vanya invites us into a world of agony, ecstasy, and absurdity—of passionate outbursts and smothered hopes, and of large dreams crammed into little lives.

Check out “The Pearl's UNCLE VANYA” by The Pearl on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/105903523

THEATER REVIEW

On a Russian Farm, Where Frustration Grows

Hal Brooks Directs ‘Uncle Vanya’ at the Pearl Theater

By LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESSEPT. 23, 2014

Chekhov didn’t make it to the People's Climate March that flowed through Midtown Manhattan on Sunday — being dead does get in the way — but he was with the environmental activists in spirit. In “Uncle Vanya,” which opens the season at the Pearl Theater Company, this playwright’s 19th-century worries over an ailing earth are startlingly contemporary.

“The forests are disappearing one by one, the rivers are polluted, wildlife is becoming extinct, the climate is changing for the worse, every day the planet gets poorer and uglier,” Astrov, the doctor, tells his friends. “It’s a disaster!”

Finding immediacy is never a problem in Paul Schmidt’s vibrant, loose-limbed translation, which Hal Brooks, the Pearl's new artistic director, wisely uses in his production. There’s no groping through layers of musty language to find our connection to Chekhov’s little band of privileged malcontents, stricken with ennui as the Russian Empire sleepwalks toward its end.

Even so, there is an unintended remoteness to Mr. Brooks’s production, which comes to life only intermittently. It can be clever in its staging but erratic in its tone, as if more time were needed for Chekhov to soak into the actors’ bones. Along with her middle-aged uncle, Vanya (Chris Mixon), Sonya (Michelle Beck) has toiled for years to support her professor father (Dominic Cuskern) in the city. He lives off the proceeds of his daughter’s country estate, which the set designer, Jason Simms, renders with splendid airiness.

Now the professor has retired to the country with his young wife, Yelena (Rachel Botchan), and Vanya has fallen in love with her. So has Astrov (Bradford Cover), who, in turn, has captured Sonya’s heart. Romantic comedy is afoot. So, for Vanya, is midlife crisis: What does he have to show for his decades of selflessness?

But there’s a lopsidedness to the telling here. The performances by Mr. Mixon and Mr. Cover are funnier and more fully realized than those by Ms. Botchan, and Ms. Beck, whose undimmed youthful glow is persistently at odds with Sonya’s supposed plainness.

Brad Heberlee makes a nice Waffles, the poor neighbor, and Robin Leslie Brown is especially fine as Marina, the nurse. But with the strong imbalance in the principal roles, the play becomes mainly about Vanya and Astrov, and poignancy goes missing. Vanya surrenders at the end, as he always does, but in place of the sadness that should be there, we feel only emptiness.