Word: vanya
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Astrov, the troubled, drink-prone doctor in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, asks, "Those who will live a hundred ... years after us, for whom we are struggling now to beat out a road, will they remember and say a good word for us?" Those 100 years are nearly up. The play was first published 98 years ago, when Chekhov was 37 and already ailing with the consumption that would kill him seven years later. He feared that he would soon be forgotten, but today Chekhov--and particularly Uncle Vanya--seems to be everywhere...
...high-concept, image-driven entertainment, on stage as well as in the rest of popular culture, the ascendancy of what is maybe Chekhov's least eventful major drama comes as a surprise. Louis Malle's movie adaptation, Vanya on 42nd Street, has become an unexpected art-house success. This nicely calibrated play-within-a-film, starring Wallace Shawn as Vanya, follows a New York City theater company that is rehearsing the play. Two more film versions are in the works-one directed by and starring Anthony Hopkins; the other an Australian version from British stage director Michael Blakemore...
Tolstoy, famously fault finding, disliked Uncle Vanya. "Where is the drama?" he demanded. "It doesn't go anywhere." True, bullets are fired, but nobody is felled; vows of love are tendered, but none are consummated. Vanya is someone who has come to realize, belatedly, that his life "has been hopelessly wasted." He has sacrificed everything for his elderly brother-in-law, a pompous professor. Vanya's despair and resignation eventually give way to hysterical action: he picks up a pistol and goes after his brother-in-law. As usual, his aim is off, leaving him rueful: "To have made such...
Chekhov once gave an aspiring novelist some telling advice: "When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief, as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief." In its cool observational dispassion and fineness of construction, Uncle Vanya has all the grace of a gentle snowfall...
Brattle Theatre. 40 Brattle St., HarvardSquare, 876-6837. "Arabian Nights" at 8 p.m.,"Canterbury Tales" at 5:45 p.m. and "TheDecameron" at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 16."Vanya on 42nd Street" at 3, 5:20, 7:40 and 10p.m. on Friday, Feb. 17 and Saturday, Feb. 18,with a Saturday matinee at 12:45 p.m. "TaxiDriver" at 3:30 and 7:55 and "Silence of theLambs" at 1:15, 5:40 and 10 p.m. on Sunday, Feb.19. "Atlantic City" at 3:40 and 7:50 and "LocalHero" at 1:30, 5:40 and 9:45 on Monday...