UNCLE VANYA, scenes from country life

Presented at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Uncle Vanya, scenes from country life written and directed by Dmitry Krymov, a director of Russian descent, is an adaptation of the Anton Chekhov classic. Krymov’s version reframes Chekhov’s melancholic rural drama as a grotesque, surreal elegy, where absurdity and despair blur into a feverish theatrical landscape.

Uncle Vanya begins on a bare stage: a large yellow Hen, wearing pink slippers, enters carrying a small chick, gently placing it on the ground and watching as it waddles about. Moments later, Yelena (Shelby Flannerfy) arrives in heavy Victorian garb, searching for a place to change into her summer clothes. The Hen (MaryKate Glen) leaves seemingly to give Yelena privacy, only to return moments later with the rest of the cast, consisting of Natalie Battistone (Sonya), Colin Buckingham (Serebryakov), Tim Eliot (Nanny), Zach Fike Hodges (Vanya), Amen Igbinosun (Telegin), Javier Molina (Astrov), Sasha Drey (Rooster), and Anya Zicer (Mama).

Each character enters carrying large name placards and wooden chairs, arranging themselves in a semicircle facing the audience with Yelena — the wife of the self-important professor Serebryakov — at its center. One by one, from Uncle Vanya, the doctor Astrov, the professor’s daughter Sonya and the Hen drag their chairs to center stage to lament their realities to her, the structure and visual composition reminiscent of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Centering on Yelena, (wife of the professor) as an almost confessional magnet for the other characters’ longing, the production renders the Voinitsky estate as a world unraveling at the seams ecologically, emotionally, and spiritually, where figures teeter on the edge of inhumanity without ever fully losing their capacity to feel. Krymov layers heightened physicality, mask, and visual spectacle to transform Chekhov’s quiet desperation into a cacophonous “symphony of human suffering,” oscillating between trivial disappointments and mythic tragedy.

In this staging, the familiar inertia of wasted lives becomes something more volatile and uncanny, asking not only what it means to endure disappointment, but what it means to continue choosing life, tenderness, and connection amid collapse.

Krymov’s Uncle Vanya is existential, shocking, and hilarious, weaponizing dark humor to destabilize the audience at every turn. Moments of grotesque comedy land just as quickly as they curdle into discomfort. The production refuses emotional safety, instead trapping us in a jagged rhythm of laughter and unease, where the ridiculous and the tragic are indistinguishable, and where shock becomes not just an aesthetic, but a method of forcing us to confront the absurd
brutality of simply continuing to live.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Frankie Lehr

*Photos by Marina Levitskaya