Uncle Vanya by Theatre 9/12

“I felt like I was in the room with them!”  My friend said that about the movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  It was his way of explaining why he would never consider re-watching it.  It made him too uncomfortable.  For me, I had that same feeling of being in the room with George and Martha and Nick and Honey, and the same discomfort and excruciation – and that’s why I loved it! 

This is surely part of why I go to so many plays.  Live theater literally puts you in the room with the characters.  They are right there. 

Uncle Vanya, by Theatre 9/12 and playing now at the Trinity Church parish hall on First Hill in Seattle does a beautiful job of connecting the audience with the characters. 

It starts with arrangement of the space.  Fifty or sixty chairs for the audience are set up, if you were to look at them from above, in the shape of a house.  Where the peak of the roof would be, the samovar sits on its table.  It’s brilliant for the symbolism.  It also works to create an intimate space – it’s maybe thirty feet across -- inside of which the actors are free to move around without having to take into account the theatrical conventions of upstage and downstage or worry about “cheating” in this direction or that.  They can just move around the room as their character would.    Sometimes this means you have to lean to one side in your chair to see over one character’s shoulder to see the reaction on the face of the character they are talking to.  Just like you would have to if you were in the room.  Or maybe you look across to another audience member for clues about what’s happening. 

Vanya, Sonya and Yelena each have soliloquies.  They are the only actor on stage and the audience are the only other people in the room.  So, naturally each of them take their lines directly to those people.  This had such a great effect, especially when in Act Three Yelena took a good chunk of her speech that begins, “There is no greater sorrow than to know another's secret,” directly to me.  I felt so connected.  It could only have been better if she had sat down in a vacant chair next to me. 

Afterward, I could have sworn that Professor Serebryakoff and Doctor Astrov each had these kinds of direct-address speeches but in re-reading the script, it does not seem that they do.  In every scene (at least in the Project Gutenberg online version) neither the Professor nor the Doctor is ever alone on stage.  But in each of their long speeches, I guess it just felt like they were talking to me directly. 

Thanks to the configuration of the space and the production’s acknowledgment that the actors and the audience are literally in the same room together (and of course  thanks to the skill of the actors and the director) by the time of the non-climax of the play, I viscerally felt the toll of the missed shots and shots not taken.  How sad.  How unnecessary.

Final note: Adding to the sense of doom, in the pre-show speech by director Charles Waxberg, in a bit of dramatic, Checkovian irony, it was announced that the parish hall is being torn down and Uncle Vanya will be the final Theatre 9/12 show in the space. 

Photo by me of the space. 

Edit: On April 12, 2019, Theatre 9/12 announced on its Facebook page that construction at Trinity Parish has been delayed for a year and they will continue to produce shows in that space.