Lovelines

The sublime suffering of Uncle Vanya

by Bill Rodriguez

UNCLE VANYA. By Anton Chekhov, adapted by David Mamet. Directed by Anthony Estrella. With Nigel Gore, Sam Babbitt, Taryn DeVito, Jeanine Kane, and Jim O'Brien. At the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre through May 21.

This is not your grandfather's Uncle Vanya. Between David Mamet's snappy adaptation, Anton Chekhov's modern sensibility, and the SFGT troupe's smart and lively delivery, the theatrical classic speaks to today's audience as though it were written yesterday.

The attempt is hard to accomplish. The play concludes with a lengthy, lamenting monologue that could very well be read as a parody of weepy Slavic self-flagellation. But by that point, the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre production has kept us in such thrall that the speech about accepting suffering now for paradise in the next life sounds like an in-the-street interview with the pan-century Russian soul.

The Mamet adaptation is the same one that sounded so fresh in Vanya on 42nd Street, the Louis Malle film about a modern rehearsal of the play that's timeless in its troubled sensibilities.

The sometimes comic story is about a psychological whirlwind that disrupts what had been tedious everyday labors on a rural Russian estate. Unsettling routines is Serebryakov (Sam Babbitt), a retired professor of literature that the working farm has been supporting in the elevated manner to which he has become accustomed. With him is his young wife Yelena (Jeanine Kane), a beauty whom two men fall hopelessly in love with. The first is the master of the estate, Vanya (Nigel Gore), who is reminded how he has given up any life of intellectual achievement and romance by working as a farmer for 25 years.

The other would-be adulterer is a doctor, Astrov (Jim O'Brien), who is and admired by Yelena for his idealism. He is an impassioned conservationist who plants trees and preserves woodland to benefit the world a thousand years ahead. In love with him is Sofya (Taryn DeVito), Vanya's niece and the professor's daughter, who knows that everyone, including the good doctor, sees her as plain.

Uncle Vanya smolders with unrequited love. Scenes stretch to the breaking point with sexual tension. Under Anthony Estrella's alert direction, this web of unspoken relationships trembles in every other conversation. By the time the professor has summoned them all into the parlor like the inspector in the last scene of a murder mystery, his obliviousness would be hilarious if everyone around him weren't in such pain. (In the previous scene Chekhov, with his mastery of timing, had the other main characters learn that the little bit of happiness they'd hoped for in life will not be theirs.)

Ironic humor is built into such juxtapositions and tensions, but this production grounds it in character rather than comedy. In his witty diatribes and complaints, Vanya demonstrates the fertile mind that is going to seed here in the country. Gore makes him a shooting star that we know will soon be a cold cinder at the rate he's blazing. O'Brien has the doctor burn less brilliantly but no less ardently, fueled from the same bottomless decanter of vodka. Vanya is openly flirtatious, outright propositioning Yelena at times, making it clear that he's not just playing the lovesick fool. The more civilized Doctor Astrov keeps his passion within, his flashing eyes or averted glance the only evidence. These two satellites revolve around the beautiful Yelena in eccentric orbits that are fascinating to watch.

Taryn DeVito breaks our hearts as Sofya, not by making her especially soft and vulnerable, but by making her so real that we wish the heartsick girl were just a little stronger. Sam Babbitt is all strut and ego as the professor, an intellectual so shallow he does not question whether he deserves the devotion he has always demanded. Offering able support are Bernice Bronson as the nurse, Gary Lait Cummings as the guitar-playing hanger-on Telegin, and Linda Monchik as the mother.

Attentive lighting design by Matthew Terry gives us close-up effects when we need them. The set by Jennifer J. Zeyl and costumes by David T. Howard capture the milieu of borderline gentility.

This SFGT production makes Uncle Vanya speak to us as loudly as it did to turn-of-the-century Russian audiences and perhaps almost as clearly. We may not understand, or even detect, all the permutations of specific cultural angst Chekhov has arrayed for us like his favorite tchotchkes. But this staging transcends time and makes us share a commonality that, like those strolling Astrov's woods a thousand years from now, is as ancient as it is human.