VANYA ON EVERY STREET

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

Astrov, the troubled, drink-prone doctor in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, asks, "Those who will live a hundred ... years after us, for whom we are struggling now to beat out a road, will they remember and say a good word for us?" Those 100 years are nearly up. The play was first published 98 years ago, when Chekhov was 37 and already ailing with the consumption that would kill him seven years later. He feared that he would soon be forgotten, but today Chekhov--and particularly Uncle Vanya--seems to be everywhere.

In an age of high-concept, image-driven entertainment, on stage as well as in the rest of popular culture, the ascendancy of what is maybe Chekhov's least eventful major drama comes as a surprise. Louis Malle's movie adaptation, Vanya on 42nd Street, has become an unexpected art-house success. This nicely calibrated play-within-a-film, starring Wallace Shawn as Vanya, follows a New York City theater company that is rehearsing the play. Two more film versions are in the works-one directed by and starring Anthony Hopkins; the other an Australian version from British stage director Michael Blakemore. And at New York City's Circle in the Square Theatre, the play has been revived once again, with Tom Courtenay in the title role.

Tolstoy, famously fault finding, disliked Uncle Vanya. "Where is the drama?" he demanded. "It doesn't go anywhere." True, bullets are fired, but nobody is felled; vows of love are tendered, but none are consummated. Vanya is someone who has come to realize, belatedly, that his life "has been hopelessly wasted." He has sacrificed everything for his elderly brother-in-law, a pompous professor. Vanya's despair and resignation eventually give way to hysterical action: he picks up a pistol and goes after his brother-in-law. As usual, his aim is off, leaving him rueful: "To have made such a fool of myself: to have fired twice and missed him!"

Chekhov once gave an aspiring novelist some telling advice: "When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief, as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief." In its cool observational dispassion and fineness of construction, Uncle Vanya has all the grace of a gentle snowfall.

Unfortunately, the new Broadway production is an ice crystal gone a little soft at the edges. Courtenay, a veteran British stage performer probably best known here for his film roles (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; Dr. Zhivago), offers a Vanya of precise but wistful enunciations, interspersed with moments of careening grandeur. But the rest of the cast is weak. Gerry Bamman overacts as the bankrupt landowner Telyegin. Amanda Donohoe (formerly of L.A. Law) looks lovely as the irresistible beauty Yelena but fails to wring any pathos from her realization that in life she has "always played a minor role." As the professor, Werner Klemperer produces a small fool when we long for a big one-there's a panoramic sweep missing in his windy fatuities. James Fox is competent as Astrov, and at times genuinely moving, but here too we hunger for something larger. Astrov is a feckless visionary obsessed with the future; in Fox's controlled performance we miss the simultaneous brightness and vacancy of eye that belong to the incurable schemer and dreamer.

Astrov's obsession is just one aspect of the play's preoccupation with time. His medical training encourages him to see the world as his patient. The prognosis is grim: Russia's forests are being stripped, its fauna decimated, its rivers defiled. But in Vanya's eyes, time is static. Boredom, frustration, tedium will reign eternally. The choice these two philosophers contrive is desolate: the world is going to hell, or it's already there.

More than any other Russian playwright, Chekhov is perceived in America as relevant to our age. This may be owing to his trafficking in gloom (any impulse toward optimism being, of course, evidence of callowness). But even his darkest interludes are subtle and variegated. There's a vivid moment in one of his stories when an awestruck boy beholds a flash of lightning: "someone seemed to strike a match in the sky." Something lovely is always dancing beyond Chekhov's horizon, toward which his characters gaze with palpable yearning.

Perhaps it is this hint of the ideal that accounts for Vanya's continuing attraction. Even if nothing much happens onstage, everything is happening on that other, imagined stage-a world of fulfilled passions, where scholarship leads to wisdom, industry to affluence, sexual desire to spiritual communion. Chekhov's impulse is transcendent. At his best he evokes an ethereal theater where angels perform in front of angels.