My Life With Uncle Vanya, the Self-Pitying Sad Sack We Can’t Quit

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.

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 — I recognize parts of myself here. When Vanya moans, “I could have been a Dostoyevsky,” it used to seem absurd. Now I get it.

The Vanya of my mind’s eye, the face that pops to mind when he’s evoked, is Wallace Shawn, who starred in the film version, “Vanya on 42nd St.” 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 clichéd. You see it in the Bonneville “Uncle Vanya” 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’s Vanya had an unusual gravitas, a mature weariness and slow burn, his gripes more potent because you could tell he was holding back.

The drama critic Kenneth Tynan called Vanya one “of the least playable heroes in dramatic literature” because he is so hard to take seriously. But if we don’t take him seriously, Tynan argued, the play falls apart. It’s the kind of categorical statement that critics and scholars, not to mention artists, often make about Chekhov. My mother’s college acting teacher insisted that Vanya must be played as suffering from hemorrhoids (a conviction unsupported by the script).

But consider the miraculous work being done by Scott, playing all the roles through quick-changing physicality. He plays Vanya as a man stuck in arrested development, walking onstage in sunglasses, larking around with a plastic device that plays comic sounds like wolf whistles or a recorded laugh track. He is easy to see as ridiculous (as is this show, which includes a smoldering sex scene between a man and a door). Yet the production, powered by the charisma and Scott’s bold choices, holds together.