Old Play in Manhattan

Uncle Vanya (by Anton Chekhov) is off-Broadway's latest good deed. This time though the playhouse is a tiny one on the lower East Side, the players include Cinemactor Franchot Tone and other Broadway names. Directing Vanya, as he earlier did The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, David Ross has scrupulously put Chekhov's intentions first: if he sometimes falters with so trickily delicate a play, he oftener succeeds. Chekhov's provincial tale of pathetically muffed chances and comically muddled lives, of a pompous fool for whom better people have toiled and a shallow woman with whom better men are infatuated, is wonderfully life-sized and life-stained. Compared to The Three Sisters or The Cherry Orchard, Vanya has little resonance or fragrance: it offers fly-specks rather than patina, flatted notes oftener than chords. Chekhov boils down his characters' moral attitudes to reveal personal resentments, and shows the flabbiness of it-might-have-been no less than the pathos. But just because his people exhibit as much needless waste as honest wear in their lives, they are extraordinarily human and central. And because Chekhov was compassionate as well as lynx-eyed, Vanya shows how real the hurts can be, however comic the poses and self-pities.

In avoiding the sentimentalized Chekhov of sighs and samovars, this Vanya now and then overplays the comic side. But thanks to some good performances, including Actor Tone's, and to Stark Young's sensitive translation, it reveals why Chekhov-type playwrights are still panting to catch up with the master.

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