ABOUT
 

Vanya is a play about disappointment; when reality falls bitterly short of our expectations. It is about love, the inability to love, and about not being loved back. About regret, and the difficulty of looking into yourself and the struggle to understand what you find there. It is about suicide; about a dose of morphine which would be an end to all that. Above all, it is, I think, a play about survival; it asks, “how should we live?” 

That is the question which fired in my mind when I first read the play, which rose in my throat every day I rehearsed in Riverside Church with this company, who are - to me - giants in every way. It is also a funny play, in which people do and say stupid things very sincerely, and suffer as a result, just like us. Subtitled “a country life in four scenes,” Vanya is a snapshot of futility, unrequited love, fatality, boredom and banality in late 19th Century Russia. Yet it is that “glimmer of light shining in the distance;” faith or denial, or hope, Sonya’s will “to go on living,” which is ultimately the play’s most prescient - and unanswerable - question.
 

What can I tell you about our approach? In the months before rehearsals began, I could not shake the feeling that its characters called for exposure. To expose their secrets, bare their souls. As Vanya says, “let yourself go, at least once in your life.” So we staged it in the round, and invite you to be a fly on the wall; the play’s characters are like Astrov’s “microbes,” under your microscope. 
 

I had the feeling that things we associate with the presentation of Chekhov: mannered period performance, tradition, samovars, proscenium, criticism, “Russian-ness,” and that bastard word, “Chekhovian,” were more-or-less unnecessary, at worst pretentious and silly, and inimical to the humanity of this story. I felt that Vanya’s position in Chekhov’s catalogue - as a sort of stop-gap between the prototype Seagull and the apotheosis of the “Chekhovian” in The Three Sisters or Cherry Orchard was unwarranted, and that if we simply stripped away “naturalism and realism and all that bullshit,” the play and its characters, like a nesting doll, would reveal more of its mystery, if not resolve it. 
 

So I took everything away from the actors (they generously continued to come to rehearsals). And here you sit, before a raw timber platform and a few benches, and we ask you, like Yelena “to use your imagination,” for the rest. We hope that by offering you the bare essentials, you will be best positioned to listen (some of the best Chekhov I’ve ever heard happened around a kitchen table over soup), to the storm and to the quiet that follows. 
 

Without the compassion, rigor and generosity of many, this project would have been all the more impossible. Brian Kulick, your mentorship means the world to me. Thank you. Austin Pendleton, thanks for coffee, talking, listening and reminding me to clean up other people’s trash. Anisa Threlkeld, for holding (and guiding) my hand. Richard, for exceeding himself in every respect. Hamilton, for illumination. Camilla, for an imagination I crave time with. Sean, my third eye and steady arm. Thank you all. Special thanks to conspirator-in-chief, Kelley Moncrief, who goes above and beyond the call of duty. Thanks most of all to the cast. Without your intensity, self-belief and trust (bless you all), we would not be here. You are the show.  So, one more quote, which reminds me of you, “The people I love the best, jump into work head first.”