Bitch, bitch, bitch. Get ready for some first-class moaning and complaining from the characters in Uncle Vanya. Fortunately, the actors involved are so uniformly excellent, talent wins out over the gloom.
Vanya (Steve Carell) and his niece, Sonia (Alison Pill) have been keeping the family going so that the egotistical older brother, Alexander (Alfred Molina), can concentrate on his intellectual pursuits. Everyone falls at the feet of his glamor puss wife, Elena (Anika Noni Rose), but she's unhappy, too. Even the handsome and well respected doctor, Astrov (William Jackson Harper), is not so quietly drinking himself to death.
Director Lila Neugebauer and playwright Heidi Schreck bring new, immediate life to what could have merely been a dusty old chestnut.
Why does this play reach us on such a gut level? Is it because we live in a time of unremitting self involvement? Because war and disaster are always just around the corner? There is no ending to this drama, just as we can't see around the corner of our own existence.
