Typically, when a theater company immerses its audience directly in the path of the action it’s impossible not to get swept up in the drama. Dallas Actor’s Lab’s staging of Uncle Vanya, on the ninth floor of the Wyly Theatre, seats its spectators in a rectangle of squishy gray sofas, intimately close enough to reach out and touch the actors. Yet this lifeless, meandering production leaves its audience so distanced we might as well be sitting out on the balcony.
Chekhov is a notorious challenge for any company to produce. His characters are often stalled and stifled by life, drowning in their own ennui yet too complacent to actually do anything about it. This can make for boring theater if the director and actors don’t ferret out the black humor hiding in the lines, turning Chekhov’s hopelessness into something relatable rather than irritating.
Director Dylan Key and his ensemble—a mix of fresh faces and DAL veterans—plod straight through Annie Baker’s new translation. Baker, a lauded playwright known for her conversational dialogue and heavy use of pauses, is expert at honing in on people unsure of their direction. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flick just received a glorious production at Undermain Theatre, and two notable mountings of her slacker dramedy The Aliens played Dallas in 2013. Her interpretation of Chekhov’s script is a refreshing mix of formal language and colloquialism, modernizing the dialogue without sounding jarring. It made me want to seek out the script to see how it reads on the page.
At the Wyly, however, her words falls flat. The actors operate on two settings: introspective mumbling and melodramatic declaration. They drift in and out of the living room, flop down on chairs, bemoan their situations, and listlessly converse while never actually connecting.
Trapped at the country estate run by Vanya (a jittery David Goodwin) and his niece Sonya (Katherine Bourne), the inhabitants are bound to the petulant whims of Sonya’s father, the ailing professor (David Goodwin), who is visiting with his young and beautiful second wife, Yelena (a lithe and blank Janielle Kastner).
Vanya and Sonya have been squeezing every last kopek out of their land in order to support the professor’s academic pursuits and urban lifestyle, and now he wishes to sell the estate and reinvest. Romantic entanglements also complicate the dynamic, as everyone loves someone they cannot have.
As Vanya lusts after Yelena, so does the country doctor Astrov (DAL artistic director Kyle Lemieux), who has been the object of plain Sonya’s affection for years. There’s no subtlety to Goodwin’s pursuit of Yelena, yet far too much of it in Lemieux’s pining. When Astrov finally decides to swig the vodka and seize the day, his affections redefine “coming on too strong.”
As part of the AT&T Performing Arts Center’s Elevator Series, this staging in the rarely used ninth floor space seems at first glance an ideal setting. The production makes use of the connected balcony for entrances and exits, lending an intriguing layer to Key’s sound design, and Janet Berka’s lighting washes the high ceilings with a homey glow for daylight and purposefully disorienting, low-lit haze for nighttimes confrontations. Even arranging the audience to be as much a part of the living room as the rumpled rugs and gold velvet chair feels initially like a smart move—until you look across the room and see a patron nodding off.