Word: vanya
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...theatrical equivalent of Woody Allen in the movies. Even in his weakest plays that gift of laughter has never faltered, and it is in full flower in his trilogy. But for all its exuberant humor, Broadway Bound is a comedy only in the sense that Chekhov meant Uncle Vanya to be seen as a comedy. Its subjects include the dissolution of two marriages, the estrangements of a father from a daughter and of another father from his sons, the terminal cancer of one offstage character and the accidental death of another. Simon views the background of the play...
...Vanya Solntsev is an orphan, filed and forgotten in a Russian children's home so bleak that Dickens himself would have hesitated to describe it. The older inmates effectively run the orphanage from a boiler room, dealing dope and running teenage prostitutes. The official administration is equally corrupt and totally ineffectual. They can't even bother to teach their charges to read and write. Little Vanya's only good luck is his looks; he's simply adorable in his silent watchful way, and a prime candidate for adoption. There's big money to be made in the international traffic...
...Vanya, however, is bereft. His dream is to be reunited with his birth mother, whose name he does not know. With the help of one of the whores, he learns to read, breaks into the safe where his records are stored, discovers her whereabouts and enters upon an odyssey of discovery that is dangerous - he is, after all, only 6 - yet touched by occasional grace notes. He is pursued by the adoption agent and her very tough bodyguard (if they don't deliver the boy they will not receive their fee) and in his travels he encounters people who wish...
...audience, since director Andrei Kravchuck, in his first feature, is unblinking in his portrait of ordinary life in the former Soviet Union. The landscape is uniformly grim and tumbledown, most of the citizens of have honed their survival skills to a nastily jagged edge. At no point does little Vanya eat a meal or walk down a street that would meet even the most minimal nutritional or aesthetic standards of even the poorest American child...
...think about what a close-run race the "Pursuit of Happyness" (oh, sorry, happiness) is, how often, the runner flirts with its opposite. We do not leave The Italian beaming. We leave it with relief, but with an ashen taste in our mouths, in our souls. Yes, Vanya emerges from his travels and travails OK. But we can't help think that in the hopeless world he inhabits, there may be worse to come...