Uncle Vanya review – Steve Carell leads excellent cast in Chekhov reimagining

Vivian Beaumont Theater, New York

The star makes a convincing Broadway debut in a tragicomic winner staged with thought and deft flashes of modernity

As with Appropriate, another outstanding, claustrophobic family drama directed by Lila Neugebauer on Broadway this season, the new Broadway revival of Uncle Vanya, now playing at Lincoln Center, plays to the sound of oppressive heat. The trill of crickets, the buzz of cicadas – from the first minute, the setting is effectively muggy, at once nostalgic and portentous. (Mikhail Fiksel and Beth Lake did the sound design.) It’s the country, and the characters of Anton Chekhov’s pastoral drama of discontents wear the bucolic setting uncomfortably. In this adaptation of the 1898 play by the playwright and translator Heidi Schreck, one recalls another, more recent time of entrapment with a motley crew of relatives and friends, itchy for escape, or something more.

Chief among the grumbles is Uncle Vanya, the manager of a country estate capably played by Steve Carell in his Broadway debut. Carell, primarily known for his comic roles, leans into the bathos of a middle-aged man’s petty grievances and dyspeptic musings; his Vanya has a mischievous wink to his digs and precise comic timing, particularly when it’s at the expense of Professor Alexander (Alfred Molina, also quite funny as an out-of-touch narcissist in ill health). The Professor and his much younger, beautiful wife Elena (Anika Noni Rose) have lived off the estate’s profits in the city (formerly Moscow, but not named here) for years, but have returned for an indefinite convalescence, upending everyone’s fragile contentment – that of Vanya, who is in love with Elena and bored to tears; Elena, who is also bored to tears; provincial Dr Astrov (The Good Place’s William Jackson Harper, a standout in this celebrity cast), who is also in love with Elena; and Sonia (Alison Pill), who is hopelessly in love with Astrov.