It’s not easy to capture a social and cultural hub, but the writer and director Matthew Gasda gave it a good try in “Dimes Square” (2022), a play about a small group of denizens from the title Manhattan scene — a tiny enclave that Gasda portrayed as a petri dish of competing insecurities and rivalries.
It makes sense, then, that Gasda is now directing a revival of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” which the writer Jon Robin Baitz once pithily described as “a drama about being driven insane by the sound of other people’s desires, complaints and aspirations when you’re already being tortured by your own.”
Taking place at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research, in Greenpoint, this version bears a title, “Vanya on Huron Street,” that echoes that of the Louis Malle film “Vanya on 42nd Street” (1994). But unlike that mise en abyme of an “Uncle Vanya” production by André Gregory, Gasda’s take is not a revision or a deconstruction, and it is not sustained by spectacular acting, either.
So once again we are back with Sonya (Mia Vallet, the cast’s brightest light), who is desperately in love with Astrov (George Olesky), who pines for Yelena (Asli Mumtas), the wife of an older, pedantic professor (Derrick Peterson, whose gray ponytail does half the characterization work). Sonya’s uncle Vanya (Bob Laine) also holds unrequited lust for Yelena.
This production does not resort to modern signifiers to evoke Chekhov’s prescience, although at one point Astrov sings the first lines from the song “100,000 Fireflies” by the Magnetic Fields. Those counting on a hipster update from Gasda will be surprised by how conventional “Vanya on Huron Street” is. This goes against expectations since his own plays, from “Dimes Square” (which is back in repertory at Brooklyn Center for Theater Research) to “Zoomers” and “Doomers,” very much chronicle specific 21st-century urban milieus. The new translation by Albina Aleksandrova won’t send purists into a tizzy, the costumes are present day but low key (Bernardo Ortiz is the wardrobe consultant) and nobody’s obsessively scrolling their Instagram feed. I could not tell if I was disappointed or relieved by this allegiance to the original.
Intimate Chekhov is his own theatrical subgenre — in 2012, Annie Baker and Sam Gold’s divisive “Uncle Vanya” turned Soho Rep into a claustrophobic hangout and Jack Serio’s loft version, from 2023, made a kinetically immersive use of the space. Here, however, a loft just happens to be where Gasda operates from. The audience sits in a standard configuration and the director gives us a straightforward iteration of an oft-produced masterpiece whose themes transcend the decades — perhaps leaving it alone is his way of underscoring both Chekhov’s influence on his own writing and the work’s timelessness.
In “Uncle Vanya,” people suffer heartbreak from a thousand cuts, and we watch as they are not so much flamboyantly destroyed as sapped by drip-drip-drip disappointment. Because the play is nearly unsinkable, Gasda’s rendering of the familiar web of thwarted ambitions and desires held my attention, despite weaknesses — some of the performances are unpolished and seeds of interesting ideas are not fully developed.
The most provocative of those has to do with Vanya himself. He tends to be portrayed as a misanthropic, lovelorn sad sap, but Laine’s interpretation makes him angry, aggressive. This Vanya is a ball of pent-up frustration and an ugly drunk whom Yelena has to push away when he comes close to physically harassing her. Days later, I’m still mulling over that one interaction.
Vanya on Huron Street
Through Feb. 4 at Brooklyn Center for Theater Research; brooklyncenterfortheatreresearch.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.
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