The Patient Is the Disease

By T.E.K.

When one attends a Chekhov play, one does not, strictly speaking, go to the theater. One drops in on life. No stethoscope is needed to detect the heartbeat of existence. Chekhov may be the best imaginable argument for a playwright's having some other occupation.

As a physician, Chekhov focused on life instead of zeroing in on a desk, a blank piece of paper and some obsessive fantasy or other. As a doctor, he knew that to some degree the patient is the disease. A doctor with a tragic sense is aware that all of his patients will die, even the ones whom he has helped to cure. In the meantime, there is the interminable process of living. Diagnosis is simply a gauge for determining what stage the wasting-away process has reached. Chekhov is a great diagnostician, a man with an immensely vital sense of life on the wane.

Uncle Vanya is a tale of stunted, shunted, desiccated lives. "Can these bones live?" one might ask of the characters. They do in this lovingly fleshed-out revival of the play by off-Broadway's Roundabout Theater, under its able and adventurous director, Gene Feist.

The stage comes to life like an animated family album. Professor Serebryakov (Thayer David), an aged pedant with a book-lined skull, one of the eternal fourth-raters of the life of the mind. His second wife Helena (Elizabeth Owens), a pampered young tigress on a sick old husband's fretful leash. Dr. Astrov (Winston May), pickled in vodka and suffocating in a town that the god of civilization forgot. Uncle Vanya (Sterling Jensen), who has turned his life into bread for the professor and been bitterly cheated of even the crumbs. Sonya, a flower of a girl, blooming without sun, air or water, and snapped in two by unrequited love. In this role, Julie Garfield makes emotion lambent with a moving grace and ardor that would have brought tears of pride to the eyes of her father, John Garfield.

Bravo to all! The New York theater gives us relatively few occasions to rejoice. This is one of them.

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