Bottling the human condition: Crow’s Theatre choreographs an immersive Uncle Vanya

I’m a comic book fan, and as I sat mesmerized by the Crow’s Theatre season-opener Uncle Vanya, an unexpected image popped into my head.

The bottle city of Kandor. 

Before the planet Krypton’s destruction, Kandor and all of its inhabitants were plucked from the planet by Superman arch-foe and city collector Brainiac. Shrunk to tiny size, they were sealed in a bottle and placed on a shelf. Superman eventually rescued the bottle city, but was thwarted in his attempts to restore it to full size. He took the bottle to his Fortress of Solitude, and there the city and its people remained: cut off from their former civilization and the larger world, living out their lives in a closed system circumscribed by viewing glass.  

Watching Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya directed by Chris Abraham in a new adaptation by Liisa Repo-Martell, I felt like Superman squinting through the glass at the cut-off city of Kandor. For within the walls of the Guloien Theatre, the human condition – in all of its absurdity, pathos, humour and tactility – has been bottled for us exquisitely. 

Elderly Professor Alexandre (Eric Petersen) is visiting his declining country estate. The estate is inhabited year-round by his daughter Sonya (Bahia Watson and Liisa Repo-Martell); his late wife’s brother Ivan, known as Vanya (Tom Rooney); her mother Maria (dtaborah johnson) and their old nanny Marina (Carolyn Fe). This forgotten former-family manages the estate and sends Alexandre the proceeds . . . while he lives large in town with his new young wife Yelena (Shannon Taylor). Neighbours Telegin (Anand Rajaram) and Doctor Astrov (Ali Kazmi) are frequent visitors to the estate. 

When we first peer through the glass, Alexandre and Yelena are on an extended – and increasingly fraught – visit to the estate. Alexandre’s announcement that he wishes to sell the estate and dispossess the family spurs explosive tension. At the same time, a complex web of thwarted ambition and resentment is unravelling, and complex unrequited – and unrequitable — love relationships are emerging among Sonya, Doctor Astrov, Yelena and Vanya. 

This is a magical production whose brightest star is Julie Fox and Josh Quinlan’s set. The normally darkened Guloien Theatre has been emptied, illuminated and transformed into the sprawling, meticulously realized drawing room of a Russian country estate, circa 1900. Atop wood flooring, rugs and furniture are distributed – a massive wooden table, a desk, a chaise, a pile of logs, piles of books. Surfaces bristle with period objects that bespeak untold stories and significance. 

On each of the room’s four walls, a shallow tier of 2-4 rows of audience members watch the show in the round. The walls behind and among the audience members extend the illusion. In the four corners of the room (two of which audiences stream by on their way to their seats) are adjacent, obscured-visibility living spaces. They include a pantry, a small piano room, and the front entryway leading outside (cleverly realized through set and lighting design). The action moves right into these when it needs to. 

Abraham’s direction roots the production in the meticulous specificity of this gorgeous space. The experience becomes so immersive that it doesn’t feel like watching theatre. Anchored in this real-seeming place, we eavesdrop and gawk voyeuristically as these characters pour out hopes, fears, frustrations and unmet emotional needs. The solidity and precision of the estate is an intractable counterweight to the pull of their aspirations away from it – to be elsewhere, to be otherwise situated . . . to be loved.  

They wish. They hope. They long. And sometimes they attempt action. When they do, their awkward fumbling yields substantial humour in moments of rueful self-awareness or oblivious self-ignorance, insight or opacity, absurd physical conflict or implausibly-uttered wisdom. Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is a very funny play – funny ha ha, and also, in that Chekhovian way, funny odd. But the laugh-out loud moments tend to be accompanied by rueful grimaces. Like the characters, the humour can never really break free of this place.

The performances are exquisite. Abraham pivots the characters around and throughout this well-defined space continuously. Dance-like physical movement visualizes the abortive choreography of their thwarted love relationships. In his few scenes, Petersen stalks the stage and chews the scenery as the bombastic, sputtering, self-absorbed Professor who catalyzes so much of the drama. Rooney’s rumpled, mumbling Vanya performs his mercurial unhappy dance with alternating gusts of self-absorption, quiet desperation and manic excess. A brittle Taylor compels as the weary, regretful yet clear-eyed Yelena. Kazmi’s Doctor Astrov prowls the stage hypnotically as a  magnetic and virile, yet equally melancholy counterpoint to the others. And Watson’s Sonia is simply captivating as the production’s wistful, understated and deceptively resilient beating heart.  

Ultimately, despite their movement and their talk, they are caught: like flies or like citizens of Kandor. Outside, change is rampant. It’s visible in deforestation and the destruction of animal habitat (which the Doctor expansively describes in what feels like a moment of time-travel environmental activism). 

Inside, however, there is only the estate. This tactile, tangible place – cut off from the exterior world – holds them frozen, in static relationships with each other, with their pasts, and with the future. 

We peer at this beautiful prison and its inhabitants. We laugh ruefully at their absurdity, and we contemplate what it might take to break them free. But this is the human condition, bottled for our entertainment. 

Like Superman with Kandor, we can only watch.

Reserve tickets on crowstheatre.com.

© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2022