The New Uncle Vanya’s Aims Are Off

For a middle-aged estate manager with a drinking problem, a crush on his former brother-in-law’s too-young new wife, and a creeping horror that he has wasted his life, Ivan Petrovich Voynitsky — known to friends and audiences as Vanya — is so hot right now. Chekhov’s plays have an uncanny tendency to resurface in waves in the English-speaking theater, and we’re in an Uncle Vanya moment. Perhaps it has to do with a pandemic-adjacent sense of claustrophobia or the relatability of existential crisis.