Review: Uncle Vanya at the Off Center [Theater]

Here, the careful routine of a well-maintained country estate has been turned upside down by the arrival of its complaining patriarch, the retired professor Serebreyakov, and his young second wife, the beautiful, indolent Elena. After they arrive, the midday meal happens after dark, the estate's financial books and fields lie neglected, and Vanya, brother of the professor's deceased first wife, has fallen out of his routine and is in thrall to Elena.

Robert Matney plays the bachelor Vanya with a bitter humor, noisily crowing about his wasted life and unfulfilled potential while making hungry eyes at his former mentor's pretty wife. Liz Fisher's Elena brings a flash of glamour to the estate, and though her flirtatiousness seems quite tame, men flock to her, moths to a bored, youthful flame. Meanwhile, the professor's industrious, mousy daughter Sonya pines after the local doctor, Astrov (Matt Radford). In turn, the doctor, who is an amateur arborist, comes to visit much more frequently now that the professor and his new wife are around.

This production strikes a balance between themes that feel contemporary (unrequited love) and more dated (the lament of an idle, and therefore wasted, life). Somewhere in the middle, a streak of environmentalism feels both current and strangely alien in its prominence. “Green” is such a saturated marketing term that we forget its implications, but the doctor Astrov's landscape drawings clearly track changes to the country landscape he's observed in his own lifetime. Sincere as it is, his passionate environmentalist speech doubles as a wooing tactic, as he turns his pleading eyes on Elena, while Vanya stands by shooting daggers at him. The three form a strange triangle throughout the play. One might assume Elena entertains the men's entreaties out of a desire for entertainment, if not for her pained outbursts. Will she give in to one of the men, or will she live out her years in sleepless nights spent tending to her husband's ailments?

A unified design reinforces the oppressive heat and monotony described by Chekhov. The largely neutral palate of Julia Chinnock-Howze's lovely costume design is interrupted with flashes of color and glamour for the attention-commanding Elena. The arresting visual in Ia Ensterä's wood-saturated set is a canopy of huge, dry branches that unfold in the rafters above the scene like the spokes of a strange wheel - a visual reminder of Astrov's fervent argument for trees as well as a symbol of the comfortable, but terrible death all seem to be moving towards, slowly, of course, taking all the time in the world.