This morning, in looking at the Fall
Arts Preview (Part II) in the SF Chronicle this morning, I noticed that
Uncle Vanya is being staged at SF
State from Nov 20 - Dec 6. Wow, yet another performance. I've been surprised
by the number of times that Uncle Vanya been been staged. Is the play
being performed disproportionately often in the U.S. and Canada? Maybe it's
because my obsession with the play makes me look out for it, making it only
seem more popular than other plays.

I ponder this question as I wonder whether I'm the only one who is so into
this play. Clearly there are people with a much more serious investment in the
play, such as anyone who has participated in any production of Uncle Vanya.
I'm thinking of folks like myself who come at the play as an amateur.

Today, I got the sense that no, I'm not the only person out there who has heard
the play speak to them, when I found a new translation by Curt
Columbus that was commissioned for the (apparently famous) Steppenwolf
Theatre Company in Chicago. Eureka was my reaction to the prefatory essay
by Columbus. Let me quote a bit of it (p. 4):

Of what are considered to be Chekhov's "four major plays," Uncle
Vanya is unique -- a lyrical, claustrophobic character study that takes place
over a short period of months on the Serebryakov estate. Gone is the sweep
of years that moves the plots of Seagull and Three Sisters.
The issues of class and wealth that pervade the other plays have no importance
in this drama. There are no grande dames of the stage here, no general's daughters,
no wealthy landowners. This is a petty squabble over an inheritance, an issue
of a few hundred rubles a month. These are a handful of little people--a country
doctor, a simple farmer and his niece, a retired professor and his too-young
wife--who are trying to find some meaning and some romance in their little
lives. Strangely, it is these very qualities of ordinariness that give the
play such enormous resonance with modern American audiences.

"Uncle Vanya is an American play," a Russian director once told
me. "Family members come for a visit, they fight, they scream, someone
fires a gun, and then everyone makes up and says, 'See you next Christmas.'"
This overly simplistic assessment gets at the core of why the play engenders
such interest, such passion in America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. After one has experienced the claustrophobic poetry of Tennesse
Williams' fire escapes and tiny rooms, Chekhov's estate seems all the more
vivid. After one has witnessed the works of Sam Shepherd, a handful of little
people squabbling over an inheritance seems overly familiar. After one has
watched the films of Woody Allen, Uncle Vanya feels like an old, amusing family
friend, appearing both funny and tragic at the same time. Today's American
audience feels finally what Chekhov spoke so succintly a hundred years ago.

I don't know much about Tennesse Williams or Sam Shepherd myself -- but this
essay encourages me to explore these playwrights.