Uncle Vanya – Brooklyn Academy of Music OFF-BROADWAY REVIEWS

• NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF Uncle Vanya – Brooklyn Academy of Music

  

  Chekhov’s Aristocrats, Ever Absorbed in Themselves

  Ben Brantley

  April 9, 2010: The fog of repression that smothers many American or British productions of Chekhov’s plays is absent from the Maly Drama Theater’s emotionally unbridled staging of “Uncle Vanya,” which can be seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater through Sunday. Commemorating the 150th anniversary of Chekhov’s birth with an international tour, this venerable Russian company, led by Lev Dodin, brings us a savory taste of that country’s most celebrated playwright in the stinging flavors rarely seen on our shores. There is flinty, funny life in these chronically unsatisfied aristocrats absorbed in complaints about their wasted hopes and bleak futures, if only they had the wisdom to see it.

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• THEATERMANIA REVIEW OF Uncle Vanya – Brooklyn Academy of Music

  

  Uncle Vanya

  Andy Propst

  April 8, 2010: The Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg is providing an illuminating, and sometimes even revelatory, staging of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, now in a brief run at BAM's Harvey Theatre. Director Lev Dodin uncovers not only what theatergoers have always known is inherent in the classic play -- a warm, yet sometimes bittersweet humor that's mixed with a keenly felt sadness -- but also some tantalizing new insights into characters that have become exceedingly familiar to seasoned theatergoers.

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• CURTAIN UP REVIEW OF Uncle Vanya – Brooklyn Academy of Music

  

  The Donmar's Acclaimed Uncle Vanya Comes to BAM

  Elyse Sommer

  April 13, 2010: Uncle Vanya consists of a series of interchanges showing the disruptive effect of a summer visit by an ailing Professor and his young wife Yelena to the country estate he inherited from his first wife and managed by Sonya, his daughter from that marriage, and her Uncle Vanya. The social, cultural and romantic repercussions of that visit affect the entire household which, besides Vanya and Sonya, includes Vanya's mother, a tea-pouring and wisdom spouting old Nanny and the doctor called to treat the Professor's gout whose housecall lasts until the end of the play.

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• VILLAGE VOICE REVIEW OF Uncle Vanya – Brooklyn Academy of Music

  

  Lev Dodin Brings His Uncle Vanya to BAM

  Tom Steller

  April 13, 2010: When he takes on Anton Chekhov's plays, the master Russian director Lev Dodin doesn't worry about unearthing new aspects of the beloved dramatist. After all, the author left only a handful of full-length dramas when he died in 1904, and Russian stagings are as common as birch trees in the forest. "The important thing is not to set your heart on making new discoveries," he tells the Voice through a translator, "but to hope to God that you and your actors might be able to measure up to his scale of thoughts and emotions."

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• THE HUFFINGTON POST REVIEW OF Uncle Vanya – Brooklyn Academy of Music

  

  Stage Door: James Barbour, MacHomer, Uncle Vanya

  Fern Siegel

  February 23, 2009: Finally, Uncle Vanya at the CSC offers an all-star cast, but an off-kilter production. In this revival, Chekov gets short-changed. The play is powerful: Vanya (Denis O'Hare) suddenly realizes that his life has been futile, wasted in the service of ingrates who neither know nor care about his sacrifice. Chekov, a master of destroyed dreams and eternal longing, has set his story at an estate populated by a sterile, controlling academic, fawning mother-in-law, disappointed young wife and spirited idealist.

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