Uncle Vanya at Crow’s Theatre
Photo by Dahlia Katz
Since September 2021, when Crow’s Theatre reopened its doors for Cliff Cardinal’s As You Like It: A Radical Retelling, the seating of their mainstage theatre, the Guloien, has remained static. I assume this was because of COVID regulations: it’s easier to keep the audience distanced from the actors in a proscenium setup, so they just stuck with that. But for their 2022-2023 season opener, Uncle Vanya, director Chris Abraham has reimagined the space entirely.
The show is performed in the round on a highly detailed set designed by Julie Fox and Josh Quinlan. The details spill off the obvious playing space of the stage and into the rest of the theatre: in every corner, there are details only visible to a small portion of the audience, and they stretch up to the ceiling; things like peeling paint and tinted ceiling height windows give the space tremendous depth.
The actors’ performances are equally detailed, and completely realistic — they don’t even break the fourth wall for their monologues.
As far as I can tell, then, this is quite a traditional Uncle Vanya. It’s period, realistic, and doesn’t make any radical cuts to the text. But it wouldn’t be fair to call it “museum theatre” — it’s too alive for that.
The actors are the primary providers of this aliveness. Everything feels loose, easy, and playful — highlighting the script’s comic aspects. Tom Rooney, who plays Vanya, is especially adept at never “playing” his character’s tragedy. He keeps up his walls as long as he possibly can, seeming okay though we know he is not. His silences are especially heartbreaking. But it’s not only Rooney — this is a truly world class ensemble of actors through and through.
In fact, as traditional approaches to Uncle Vanya go, it doesn’t get much better than this. It’s as if the play jumped off the page in ideal form. The themes that pop out in this production are the themes that pop out in the script — how we spend our time, how we enjoy our lives — and Sonya’s final monologue, brilliantly rendered by Bahia Watson, remains the play’s emotional centerpiece.
But it does feel like this exact production Uncle Vanya has been attempted hundreds of times, even if it is rarely pulled off so well. Beyond the in the round seating and more comic approach, this production doesn’t seem to have much of a specific direction, thematically or formally.
That’s fine, of course — I’m sure there are lots of people who would love to see a classic so expertly done, and it’s a good way to experience Uncle Vanya for the first time. But, for better or for worse, this is not a production that will challenge your preconceptions of what the play is.