UNCLE VANYA by Anton Chekhov

role: Vanya

produced by The ActorsNET of Bucks County

January 28 - February 13, 2011

directed by Cheryl Doyle

set design by George Hartpence

script adapted by ActorsNET

role: Astrov

produced by The Villagers' Theatre

October 5 - 20, 2007

directed by Rob Pherson

script adaptation by Curt Columbus

SYNOPSIS

Uncle Vanya is set on a country estate some time towards the end of the 19th century. Aleksandr Serebryakov, a retired university professor, has moved there with his second wife, Yelena. For the past 25 years, the estate has been managed by Vanya, the brother of the professor’s deceased first wife, and the professor’s daughter, Sonya (Vanya’s niece), who has been living on the estate since her father’s remarriage. Out of respect for the professor’s position and learning, Vanya has willingly undertaken the management of the estate for a token annual salary. However, while the professor has been living with them, Vanya has become increasingly disillusioned; all he now sees is an old man afflicted with aches and pains, married to a beautiful and much younger wife—to whom Vanya himself would have proposed some years previously, but let the chance slip, to his regret. The professor now symbolizes for Vanya the waste of his own life.

As if in revenge, Vanya seeks to declare his love for Yelena at every possible opportunity, much to her irritation. Yelena has also attracted the attention of Dr. Astrov, a local landowner who is passionate about the environment, and dulls his impatience with Russian provincialism in alcohol. Astrov, who has been called in to look after the professor, spends much of his time at the estate, neglecting his medical duties to be in Yelena’s presence. Sonya has been in love with Astrov for the past six years, secretly and quietly. When she asks Yelena to speak to Astrov on her behalf, the doctor misinterprets, and declares his own feelings for Yelena. Astrov makes an attempt to embrace her, which is interrupted by Vanya.

As these entanglements unfold, the professor announces his decision to sell the estate, setting the characters off on a series of events that culminate in scenes of unexpected comedy and profound emotion, masterfully interwoven by Chekhov in one of his greatest plays.

“Chekhov lived only forty-four years, and during the last third of his life he was surely conscious of the likelihood of a premature death. Those of us who do not live under such a distinctly stated sentence of death cannot know what it is like. Chekhov’s masterpieces are always obliquely telling us.”
~Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (Random House, 2002)

“Came home dazed and soulscarred by your play, wrote you a long letter and tore it up. One cannot express fully and coherently the effect your play has on the soul, although I felt, as I watched its heroes, as though someone were sawing at me with a blunt-edged saw… For me Uncle Vanya is…a completely new form of dramatic art.”
~Maxim Gorki after seeing Uncle Vanya

 “Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal at the table. Just having a meal. But at the same time their happiness is being smashed up.”
~Chekhov

Forests serve the climate, climate affects character, and so on and so forth. There can be no civilization or happiness if the forests crash down before the axe, if the climate is cruel and harsh and if people are the same…. The future is terrible!
~Chekhov, letter to A.S. Suvorin, 18 October 1888 

"Such as kidder!" ~ Count Leo Tolstoy
Yelena arranging to meet Astrov in the forest, tomorrow, around two.

 "Chekhov was always extremely fond of everything comic, humorous; he liked listening to funny stories, and sitting in a corner, his head propped on his hand, pinching his beard, he would go off into such infectious laughter that I often left off listening to the story and enjoyed it second-hand through him.”
~Olga Knipper (his wife) on Chekhov

(above : Anton Chekhov by Osip Braz, 1898)

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860 and raised in the seaside town of Taganrog, in southern Russia. He was the grandson of serfs who managed to buy themselves and their families out of slavery; his own family suffered financial hardship after his father, a merchant (and an authoritarian and religious fanatic) was declared bankrupt in 1876. Chekhov entered medical school in 1879, one year before he published his first short story, and graduated from Moscow University in 1884 with a medical degree. His patients, mostly peasants, were usually poor; he did not charge for his services and donated his time to work in famine and cholera relief. His early writings, humorous sketches including a weekly contribution to a magazine called Fragments, were published under pseudonyms and were initially more of a financial necessity than a chosen career; with these earnings he supported his family.

 While still in medical school, Chekhov began to write his earliest plays, including the work now known as Platonov (written 1881-82, discovered 1923); Ivanov (1887), which had a disastrous first production; and The Wood Demon (1889), another failure, which he later revised as Uncle Vanya. He also began to suffer the first symptoms of tuberculosis, which would later kill him. He began to achieve true literary success when he began writing serious literature in the late 1880s, and won the Pushkin Prize in 1888 for his short story collection In the Twilight. A master of short fiction who is considered the father of the modern short story, Chekhov wrote more than two hundred short stories during his lifetime.

 Chekhov is famously quoted for his statement, “narrative is my legal wife and drama a flamboyant, rowdy, impudent, exhausting mistress.” His play The Seagull, now acknowledged as a masterpiece, and the first of his five major plays, debuted in 1896, and was another failure. He did not find success as a dramatist until Konstantin Stanislavski founded the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, and revived The Seagull in its first season to great acclaim. The Moscow Art Theatre went on to produce his most successful plays: Uncle Vanya in 1899, Three Sisters in 1901 and The Cherry Orchard in 1904.

 Chekhov lived the last five years of his life in Yalta, where he was sent (or exiled, as critic Janet Malcolm has written in her book Reading Chekhov) for its mild climate as his health worsened, and where he built a villa. There, he wrote Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. He died of tuberculosis, from which he had been suffering from an early age, at the health resort of Badenweiler in the Black Forest area of Germany, on July 2, 1904.

Chekhov’s death has become one of "the great set pieces of literary history", retold, embroidered, and fictionalized many times since, notably in the short story Errand by Raymond Carver. In 1908, Olga, his wife, wrote this account of her husband’s last moments:

 “Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): Ich sterbe.

The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne.

Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: "It's a long time since I drank champagne."

He drained it, lay quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child...