Dramatizing the pathos of Chekhov is the easy part; finding the comedy is the challenge. Any precise translation stands a strong chance of falling flat, so retaining the characters and dilemmas while rewriting and trimming the dialogue to make it as punchy as today’s television writing is increasingly the norm. Heidi Schreck, a television writer (Billions) who earned a place on the Pulitzer and Tony shortlists for her 2019 autobiographical monologue, What the Constitution Means to Me, has jollied up 1897’s Uncle Vanya (at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center through June 16) by reconceiving the titular grumpy groaner as a caustically funny observer of the people around him, and of himself. She and Steve Carell, in the title role, have made something lively and amusing out of material that can come across as dour. At least that’s how it goes in the first half; the second half, as usual in Dr. C’s plays, is knotted with anguish and regret.
It’s no secret that Carell, who excels in the role, can do drama. As far back as 2006, in Little Miss Sunshine, he played a suicidal gay Proust scholar in a part that would have made Chekhov tip his hat, and he was outstanding two years ago in the television miniseries The Patient, in which he played a psychiatrist seeking at length to talk his serial-killer captor out of murdering him. Yet Carell has brought his comic talents to the fore and helped to make this tenth (!) Broadway edition of the play the most entertaining version I’ve ever seen. If there’s any detail that seems off, it’s that Carell, though he has let his hair go gray, is a bit too handsome for the role, which is strongly associated with character actors. (Toby Jones played Uncle Vanya in a Conor McPherson adaptation in 2020.)
In the vast Lincoln Center space—where the audience sits above and wraps around the stage—the director Lila Neugebauer and the set designer Mimi Lien have for the first act created an elegant suggestion of the commodious grounds of a summer house, with a picnic table in front, chairs scattered around, and a piano to the rear, all backed by a large image of trees. The idyllic, calm surroundings are a sort of cruel joke on the characters, who are almost without exception roiling with internal dissatisfaction. The bluer the skies, the darker their worldview.
The patriarch, that cantankerous old professor Alexander (Alfred Molina), complains nonstop about his gout (he is disagreeable even about his diagnoses; he insists his disorder is rheumatism) and neglects his gorgeous second wife, Elena (Anika Noni Rose). Vanya—whose deceased sister was the first wife of the professor—openly declares his love for the much younger Elena, to no avail. Sonia (Alison Pill), the academic’s physically unblessed daughter from his first marriage and therefore the one person present to whom Vanya is an uncle, adores the eccentric Astrov (William Jackson Harper), a traveling physician who often finds himself visiting the property, usually to hear Alexander’s complaints. He barely notices Sonia’s fixation on him and instead makes advances on Elena, to the horror of Vanya, who thought he was first in line to be her lover.
Chekhov never did better by his great theme—bourgeois self-delusion—but as richly detailed as his characters are, it requires a sensitive approach to make them seem sympathetic rather than exasperating. Though Molina’s performance is too gruff and obnoxious, that he is working in a different register than the others creates the possibility that the characters’ difficulties spring from Alexander’s personality. He’s a noxious presence that affects everything, like befouled water.
The other actors, especially Carell and Harper, make their characters universal, shaping Vanya and Astrov into Americans we’d recognize today. The audience is encouraged not to think “What fools they are!” but rather what fools we all are. Astrov is especially at home in 2024, with his endless fussing over maps meant to prove that Russia is denuding itself of forests. At the outset of one of his ridiculous rants about alleged deforestation, Vanya breaks in with a hearty, “Here we go!” (More than a hundred and twenty years of development and industrialization later, Russia still has more than two billion acres of forests, the most of any country, and its land is roughly half forest.) This apostle of environmentalism presaged later green crusaders and their irrational monomania. For Chekhov, Astrov exemplified how successful people whip up misery out of nothing, create their own cages for their psyches, and carry malaise everywhere. There is much wistful sadness in Harper’s tender portrayal. Like Elena, a pristine environment is something he’ll never have.
Meanwhile, Carell, steering clear of portraying Vanya as weak and pathetic, makes him appealingly mischievous. God will never stop using him as a punchline, though. Neugebauer perfectly encapsulates how put-upon he is when, late in the first act, the skies open and it rains onstage. Carell, getting thoroughly drenched, simply stands and absorbs punishment. His expression summons Job, or Charlie Brown.
When the second act begins, with the set now given over to indoor furniture (mid-century modern, including a record player), it’s as if an autumnal chill has descended on the theater. The time for summer’s romantic follies has ended, even though no one got much satisfaction from them. Along with the weather, the mood turns bleak, and a pistol appears. It would be out of character for anyone present actually to solve anything with a bullet, however. The professor blusters, everyone else mutters about their misfortunes, and Chekhov’s gently humorous wisdom about how people manufacture their own problems shines anew.
The cast of Mary Jane (at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through June 16) consists of five women dealing with a child in extremis. The absence of men seems apt; though no one in Amy Herzog’s finely etched play mentions it, it is women who do the overwhelming majority of the caring for the most vulnerable among us, especially at the beginning and end of life. Men seem to lack the strength for these most emotionally demanding interludes; frequently they evaporate from the scene. The unfortunate truth for the title character, played by Rachel McAdams in a performance that is alternately winsome, gutsy, and sorrowful, is that her toddler son, Alex, aged two and a half, is at both the beginning and end of his life.
The child, born prematurely at twenty-five weeks, has cerebral palsy, along with severe heart and lung disease. A bed and attendant high-tech machinery are his permanent residence. Unseen by the audience, he is suggested by a jumble of equipment at the back of the stage from which sometimes issues an alarm indicating yet another life-threatening crisis. Mary Jane is not only a suffering mother but a single one; the boy’s father, Danny, also unseen in the play, departed shortly after the child was born, unable to cope with the horror. The child is unable to vocalize or even to sit up.
Mary Jane is clear-eyed about Alex’s illness and understands he is unlikely to make it to adulthood, as a doctor gently reminds her when she questions whether the amount of radiation to which he is exposed via daily X-rays is dangerous. Nevertheless, this severely tested mother remains resolutely cheerful throughout, chatty and disarming and practically glowing with maternal adoration. McAdams is ideally cast, giving what could be (and intermittently is) an emotionally raw night of theater what it most needs, which is lightness. At her best playing adorable ingenues in such movies as The Notebook, About Time, and Morning Glory, the film star is making a superb Broadway debut. Her eager, friendly peppiness continues to be her prize asset as a performer. It’s especially effective when contrasted with the crisis faced by the mother.
We come to know Mary Jane, an administrative assistant who yearns to be an elementary-school teacher, as she confronts a blocked sink with her building superintendent (Brenda Wehle) and discusses her child’s care with a dedicated nurse (April Matthis) and the woman’s adult niece (Lily Santiago). She also has a meeting in her apartment to give encouragement and coaching to a similarly situated mother (Susan Pourfar) of a desperately ill child. The director, Anne Kauffman, engineers a staging coup at the midpoint, in a spectacular scene change from Mary Jane’s Queens apartment to a hospital where the four supporting actresses return in different roles while the cheerfully indomitable Mary Jane spends every day and night by her son’s side. For seven weeks she has rarely if ever left the hospital. Yet she never falls into depression or rage and almost never even allows herself the luxury of feeling sorry for herself, much less inviting pity.
Herzog is both a successful author of original plays and a much-in-demand translator of classics. She improved both Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House (last year) and his An Enemy of the People (this year) in their most recent Broadway productions by tightening them up and reworking dialogue in a contemporary idiom. She turned to her own life for material when crafting Mary Jane, first performed in 2017 at both the Yale Rep and off Broadway. Her daughter had a congenital neuromuscular disease that made her brief life a miserable one before she died at age eleven.
Like most parents, I’d rather not think about having a terminally ill child, so I was hesitant to present myself at the theater, having had a strong adverse reaction to dead-kid plays such as Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys and David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole. Herzog hasn’t made things easy for the audience, but she doesn’t torture us. In a brisk single act running a little over ninety minutes, she finds the warmth and the beauty in Mary Jane’s desperation and even conjures up a few incidental laughs. That’s not to say there is black comedy here, simply amusing off-topic discussions. When Mary Jane meets a Buddhist hospital chaplain (also played by Wehle) who is American and converted from Christianity, she asks whether her new friend might have converted to Christianity had she grown up Buddhist. This conversation leads to an ambiguous ending in which Mary Jane’s migraine takes on the quality of an epiphany or perhaps something else. The gesture towards transcendence, however, seems discordant. Steeped in quotidian struggle, the play doesn’t need an infusion of the sensational to succeed, and so the final moments come off as a stagy intrusion into an otherwise admirably humble work.
Mary Jane is properly gutting, but only at times. It isn’t a tearjerker and doesn’t feel like either exploitation or an extended therapy session on the part of Herzog, who has put considerable space between her and her creation. (For instance, Herzog’s husband, the leading theater director Sam Gold, didn’t run away, and the pair are raising two other children.) Rather than horrifying the audience or wallowing in bleakness, the show conveys the center of Mary Jane’s attitude: the composure that comes with acceptance. Along with a renewed appreciation for everything women do for us at life’s worst junctures, that is a gift the play offers to a grateful audience.
Who needs color? Or personality?” asks the arrogant plutocrat Boris Berezovsky as he considers whom to select as his personal prime minister in 1999 Russia in Patriots (at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre through June 23). “All we need is a nice gray executioner of our wishes.” “Executor,” replies Boris Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana.
Peter Morgan, the English writer who has made an industry of his fascination with imagining the possible relationships of British prime ministers and their sovereigns—the 2006 movie The Queen, the 2013 play The Audience, and the 2016–23 Netflix series The Crown—turns his attention eastward in an imperfect play that is nonetheless at times incisive, compelling, and smart. Morgan seeks to compress into a single evening the political and economic restructuring of post-Soviet Russia. In the 1991–99 Yeltsin era, a handful of pirates took advantage of privatization to gobble up huge amounts of wealth, disdaining the president as an avuncular drunk who merely observed from a harmless distance. Morgan, perhaps the leading political dramatist of his generation (he also wrote the play and movie Frost/Nixon, among several other history-minded works), again uses well-known news events as a frame. He fills it out with mostly plausible scenes of dramatic confrontation between savvy and powerful equals grappling for advantage. Morgan’s gifts for crafting character and summing up history in tart dialogue are again on display, but the play drags in spots, partly because it has no plot.
Berezovsky, who we learn in a prologue was dubbed a math prodigy at age nine, in 1955, and by 1994 was a smug salesman making a fortune selling cars whose purchase he financed by astutely borrowing on the eve of a bout of hyperinflation he alone foresaw, is played to the hilt, and then some, by the career character actor Michael Stuhlbarg. Amid raised eyebrows and tight-lipped smiles, he plays the part like some Richard III of Moscow. Evocatively directed by Rupert Goold, who first staged it two years ago at London’s Almeida Theatre, the play unfolds on a single set that suggests a sleek urban bar representing both new Russia (chic and moneyed, at least for some) and old (phlegmatic, glum, vodka-soaked). Dramatic red and black colors dominate the bar, which encircles a raised platform for the declarations and declamations of this strutting, vainglorious man.
Unlike previous Russian leaders, Berezovsky is uninterested in ideology or land; he merely wants to add to his wealth, and politics is the boring, necessary tool to keep the cash flowing. He meets Vladimir Putin (a chillingly recessive Will Keen) when the latter is merely the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Berezovsky wishes to install a large car dealership and offers to cut through the red tape with a blade made of money. Putin, to his surprise (and, perhaps, the audience’s), cannot be bribed. “Are you even Russian?” asks a bewildered Berezovsky.
Morgan and Keen have fashioned a Putin who, though ruthless, is not without honor, and have even allowed for the possibility that some of the murders of his political enemies that have been widely attributed to him may have been carried out independently, without his knowledge, by fanatics who sought to earn his favor. Putin tends to be painted in broad strokes these days, especially by those who imagine that he’s an equivalent to, or even partner of, his supposed fellow supervillain Donald Trump. But to his credit Morgan eschews caricature and even manages not to drop in any gratuitous Trump allusions to earn the cheapest laughs available in the entertainment industry. This Putin is, above all else, coldly efficient.
For those who didn’t closely follow what happened in post-Soviet Russia, Patriots is a useful primer: when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned on the last day of 1999, the presidency fell to Putin, who turned it into a crown. Berezovsky and the other robber barons, such as his eager young protégé and business partner Roman Abramovich (Luke Thallon), with whom he arranged to take over Russia’s previously state-owned oil firm, are called on the carpet and told the party’s over; no longer will business run the state. Berezovsky unwisely tries to fight back via his television network but discovers too late that the sock puppet has become a monster.
There is no disguising the play’s flaws: running two and a half hours, with very little in the way of visual ornament (an exception is the occasional projection of television news segments) to dress up the nonstop talk, and giving the audience no one to root for, it stretches beyond its natural length, which is perhaps an hour and forty-five minutes, for the sake of adding an intermission and its attendant possibilities for the profitable sale of cocktails. Nevertheless, it’s an insightful consideration of what might have happened behind the scenes as Putin tightened his grip and men like Berezovsky were forced out. Kleptocracy yielded to dictatorship, and the sad saga of Russia held in the grip of strongmen rolled on.