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I am tempted to go on a long tangent about how 47 in Russia more than a century ago was much older than it is now. But instead, a confession: The first time I met Vanya was when I was a teenager and he seemed like an extremely old and clownish bore. Now that I am his age, he comes off more sympathetic. Funny how that happens.<\/p>\n
His obsession with lost chances, the way he transforms thwarted ambition into simmering resentments that emerge as smirking mockery, his delusion about the writer he could have been \u2014 I recognize parts of myself here. When Vanya moans, \u201cI could have been a Dostoyevsky,\u201d it used to seem absurd. Now I get it.<\/p>\n
The Vanya of my mind\u2019s eye, the face that pops to mind when he\u2019s evoked, is Wallace Shawn, who starred in the film version, \u201cVanya on 42nd St.\u201d<\/a> It began with a superb cast featuring Larry Pine and Julianne Moore coming to work in street clothes, a fourth wall-busting gesture that has become fashionable if not clich\u00e9d. You see it in the Bonneville \u201cUncle Vanya\u201d as well as to a lesser degree in the revival with Scott, who begins by turning on the lights, making a cup of tea and adjusting the set. In contrast to those revivals, Shawn\u2019s Vanya had an unusual gravitas, a mature weariness and slow burn, his gripes more potent because you could tell he was holding back.<\/p>\n The drama critic Kenneth Tynan called Vanya one \u201cof the least playable heroes in dramatic literature\u201d because he is so hard to take seriously. But if we don\u2019t take him seriously, Tynan argued, the play falls apart. It\u2019s the kind of categorical statement that critics and scholars, not to mention artists, often make about Chekhov. My mother\u2019s college acting teacher insisted that Vanya must be played as suffering from hemorrhoids (a conviction unsupported by the script).<\/p>\n