Chekhov, Misfiring An Uncle Vanya that’s all talk.

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 all as Vanya—is so hot right now. Jack Serio’s “loft Vanya” was a coveted ticket last year, and in London, Andrew Scott recently played all the parts. Perhaps it has to do with pandemic-adjacent claustrophobia or existential crisis, but whatever the case, Heidi Schreck’s new translation of Chekhov’s play joins a busy field. This production’s got names (Steve Carell is carrying the autumn roses and the gun), a high-profile stage, and a palpably earnest desire to excavate the story’s humanity—and it is, unhappily, an example of how these things can fail to cohere into something powerful. Like its luckless hero, it shoots and misses.

“I’m bored!”; “God, I really am dying of boredom”; “You know why you and I are such good friends, Vanya? Because we’re both such boring, tedious people.” So say

UNCLE VANYA

Schreck’s versions of the characters on the country estate where Vanya

BY ANTON CHEKHOV.

(Carell) and his niece, Sonia (Alison Pill), live with Vanya’s withholding

TRANSLATED BY

HEIDI SCHRECK.

mother (Jayne Houdyshell) and the tolerant old nanny, Marina (Mia

DIRECTED BY LILA NEUGEBAUER. VIVIAN

Katigbak, being wonderful)—the estate where the smart, hard-drinking

BEAUMONT THEATER. THROUGH

local doctor, Astrov (William Jackson Harper), and the endearing oddball

JUNE 16. neighbor, Waffles (Jonathan Hadary), come to spend their days and their routines have been thrown into chaos by the arrival of “the professor” (Alfred Molina) and his beautiful young wife, Elena (Anika Noni Rose). If there’s a principal trap that American productions of Chekhov, this one included, hurl themselves into, it’s taking all this talk of boredom at face value. There’s a reason whole schools of acting— and the art of modern direction—developed in tandem with Chekhov’s plays, and it’s because they require the construction of vast underground cities: The text itself is a constellation of spires, minarets, and domes, their tips peeking up through the surface of a desert after a civilization-burying sandstorm. Envisioning and enacting the limitless subtextual architecture of the plays is the great task, but here, Lila Neugebauer’s actors feel unrooted. They’re playing the uppermost level of the text, which makes for a drifting, sleepy feeling—whence comes the ancient and misguided, but all too often theatrically justifiable, complaint that in Chekhov “nothing happens.”

Though there are plenty of appealing

performers in this Vanya, there’s an enervating absence of emotional events taking place. The acting teacher Mira Rostova, who studied with Stanislavsky, talked about theatrical action in terms of the “Doings.” A line of text, she posited, must be doing something essential: the “admit,” say, or the “lament with humor.” The Doings can provide uplift and drive to language that can seem to meander or simply describe states of being (“I’m exhausted,” “I’m so happy”); they can provide actors with concrete things to be fighting for or guarding against. Here, one gets the sense that Neugebauer and her ensemble have done plenty of talking about the play but that somewhere between the table and the stage, good ideas have floated back up into the realm of theory. They haven’t coalesced into engines.

Schreck has given the text a hard shove toward the contemporary and the casual (echoed in Kaye Voyce’s costumes, which have Astrov in hospital scrubs and Elena in a different jewel-tone dress for each act). She has also done away with any mention of Russia and with patronymics and diminutives. Theoretically that’s fine, but it lands Neugebauer’s production in a kind of no-place, a vague nowish-ness that hits bumps when a bit of formality escapes Schreck’s sandpaper (“I can feel the touch of his hands … The second he shows up, I run to him and start babbling”) or when a character’s attitude jangles against our present. Of the company, only Katigbak, Hadary, and Molina sound really at home—katigbak and Hadary because they know exactly how to access the cosmic acceptance the rest of the characters lack; Molina because, along with the professor’s affectations, his own British accent gives him a natural boost toward style, making him sound comfortable in language that hasn’t entirely found its own sense of ease.

Of course, it’s true that Chekhov’s people are discontented—horribly and hilariously so—but a feeling of gnawing frustration in a character is different from a lack of release in a performance. And at the center of this Uncle Vanya is a quartet of actors who, despite individual capacities to be lovely or poignant or very funny, don’t spark. Neugebauer is presiding over one of the least sexy Vanyas I’ve ever seen. The real rain that douses the Beaumont’s stage in Act Two is the most sensual thing in the production. While both Carell and Harper have flexed their comic chops on TV, neither cracks open easily into naked pathos or desire. Harper, especially, needs to fascinate two women and, eventually, be rocked by lust for one of them, but his Astrov’s particular brand of suffering doesn’t make much room for stuff below the neck. That itchy, avoidant quality hits home when he goes on an anxious tear—he’s delightful in a rant about how people find him weird—and it’s part of what made him so much fun on The Good Place. In that show, Harper’s sacral chakra (the sexy one) is closed, while his crown (intellect and spirit) is dizzyingly exploded. But it’s not enough here, nor is it helped by Pill’s Sonia, who has a worked-up, tearful childishness that belies the rock-solidness of her feelings for Astrov and, more important, her role as the play’s moral anchor.

Carell locates moments of morbid fun (as when he and Harper’s Astrov get drunk together and he grabs a lamp and fakes electrocution), but his Vanya never really breaks in two. The audience is happy to laugh when, after plummeting into despair, he unsuccessfully fires two shots at the professor— and the moment should be funny; it is funny. It’s also so painful it should take the breath out of us, and it doesn’t. Nor does the production’s physicality. In one moment, Carell leaps on a table and it makes you blink: In context, it feels forced and awkward, but that’s only because no one’s body has as yet been similarly activated.

We still don’t know how to do Chekhov in this country. Our laments lack humor and our humor lacks lament, we complain where we could defy, and we rarely demonstrate— or provoke—amazement. “I want to live,” insist his characters. “We have to live.” That’s not a sigh. It’s a howl, an invitation to existential scale that bursts the limits of our theatrical thinking. Still, we’re liable to hear

boredom and end up with boring. ■

suspected terrorists—all Muslim, most from the Middle East—but vanishingly few matter in the U.S.’S counterterrorism campaign. Despite flimsy promises from Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden to shut the place down, the lights are still on. The camp, with its dozens of remaining detainees, continues limping along, a piece of machinery left to gather dust in the country’s basement. The U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, but the forever war persists.

It has been six years since the podcast's last release and almost a full decade since Serial turned into a household name. Now, Koenig and co-host Dana Chivvis ask a question less muckraking than anthropological: What exactly was Guantánamo like on the inside? Eschewing the serialized structure that gave the show its name, the season is built on short stories drawing direct testimony from a gallery of individuals—detainees, guards, wardens, intelligence personnel, translators—who knew the place firsthand. It shares the same construct as Serial’s third season, which documented the banal goings-on in a Cleveland courthouse. The purpose isn’t to solve a mystery but to piece together the sense experience of a place.

This approach spotlights the team’s gift for provocative detail, which hits you in episode one when Koenig and Chivvis revisit recordings from a guided tour of Guantánamo they took years ago. They hook you with the surreal observation that there are three gift shops at the facility; you might stumble upon Guantánamo x Disney swag. The moment transitions into a pitchblack admission that the longer they spent in the camp, the more their initial halting discomfort about the shops melted away. They bought merch.

That permeable line between perverse surreality and inevitable normality runs through the season. When a former camp guard relates his experiences, you begin to understand how Guantánamo is a workplace like any other, even if it involves violations of international law. You get the sense of human beings being inexorably shaped by the roles they’re plugged into, their moral compasses shifting over time. Many episodes circle around a scandal in Guantánamo’s history to draw out the brutally Kafkaesque nature of life on the inside. “Ahmad the Iguana Feeder” and “The Honeymooners” recount the story of Ahmad Al-halabi, an American airman brought in to serve as a translator only to get caught up in a punishing swirl of government racism and bureaucracy. “The Big Chicken” and “Asymmetry” revolve around a warden who oversaw the facility during one of its most ruthless and disputed periods. Across these stories, the individuals in charge try to make meaning out of their power. Meanwhile, former detainees attempt to process the horrors, physical and psychological, they endured. Although some of these stories are not particularly new, Serial’s primary interest is to thread them all together within a feeling: This is what it was like, and this is what it’s still like.

What is Serial supposed to be, anyway? You’ll often hear the critique that the show never successfully replicated the energy of that first season, even as Serial Productions, the studio spun out from This American Life to house Koenig and Snyder’s future projects, continues to be a reliable publisher of popular podcasts, including S-town and, more recently, The Retrievals. But spectacle was never Serial’s intent. This should’ve been readily apparent when, in season two, Koenig and journalist-screenwriter Mark Boal explored the case of Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. Army sergeant who abandoned his post in Afghanistan and was captured by the Taliban. At the time, the second installment inspired feverish anticipation. But when it arrived, its insistence on reframing the focus away from the specific mystery (“What happened to Bergdahl?”) toward a larger idea (“What does it mean for us to keep sending young people to war?”) felt, for many listeners, like a dramatic deflation. The third season, set in the Cleveland courthouse, pushed further in this direction, not only throwing aside the notion of needing a catalyzing mystery but also challenging the importance of Serial itself. “People have asked me and people I work with the question, What does this case tell us about the criminal-justice system?” narrates Koenig, referring to Syed’s story. “Fair question.”

Pointing out the remarkable nature of oft-overlooked systems has turned out to be Serial’s underlying project. In the scope of who gets incarcerated in the U.S., Syed’s excruciatingly drawn-out case isn’t all that notable. Bergdahl’s might be extraordinary, but the blindly accepted notion we send kids to war isn’t. What happens in a courthouse is banal, even if it destroys lives. Guantánamo has been running for more than two decades, and now, buried beneath other political horrors, it has become an unremarkable part of the American story. Serial’s focus on it is perfectly aligned with what the team has always done: Dust off the machinery of power and render its parts visible. ■

“young people especially had trouble making distinctions between ages over 40,” thinks the unnamed narrator of Miranda July’s new novel, the gutsy, funny, wise, chaotic, dirty, panic-inducing All Fours. When she can bring herself to look at women a couple of decades deeper into the muck, something worse than uncertainty gets stirred up—it’s outright loathing. “Sometimes my hatred of older women almost knocked me over, it came on so abruptly,” she admits. “These ‘free spirits’ who thought they could just invent the value of things.”

In a good romantic comedy, hate is only the prelude to love. All Fours

tracks the narrator’s romantic and sexual obsessions, though the object of hate and love is herself as she reckons with her aging body and mortality. She has just turned 45. If a life is something you throw into the air, she thinks, she has reached the top; now all that remains is the fall. The particulars of her life and work strongly, provocatively resemble July’s. “I won’t get into the tedious specifics of what I do,” the narrator says, “but picture a woman who had success in several mediums at a young age and has continued very steadily, always circling her central concerns in a sort of ecstatic fugue state with the confidence that comes from knowing there is no other path—her

ALL FOURS

whole life will be this single conversation with God.”

BY MIRANDA JULY. RIVERHEAD BOOKS.

July, a 50-year-old filmmaker, fiction writer, and performance artist, lives in Los Angeles, where she coparents her child with her soon-to-be ex-husband, the

filmmaker Mike Mills. Her investigation of the body, desire, loneliness, and the failure to connect used to be maligned as twee—as if having an unusual mind were a weakness— yet time has vindicated her careful, compassionate documentation of the anxiety of life in the early digital era. From dark and lacerating short stories like 2007’s “Roy Spivey” and 2017’s “The Metal Bowl” to the astute, creepily resonant 2011 film The Future and her wacky yet deeply moving debut novel, 2015’s The First Bad Man, July is a fabulist of mortality. Her characters feel the dread of making the choices that define one’s time on earth, and they suffer the consequences of taking—and missing—their chances.

Early in All Fours, the narrator sets out alone on a road trip to New York from L.A., where she lives with her music-producer husband, Harris, and their child, Sam. She’s more of a Parker than a Driver (these are Harris’s terms; Drivers can “maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring,” while Parkers like applause and are good in an emergency), so she’s slightly nervous about the trip. She winds up redecorating a motel room half an hour from home and stays there for three weeks, having an emotionally fevered affair with a hot 31-year-old aspiring hip-hop dancer named Davey. Like a modern-day Wakefield, the title character of the Nathaniel Hawthorne story who tells his wife he’s going on a brief journey and spends the next 20 years hiding around the corner, July’s narrator burrows into a new life just out of sight of the old one. But unlike the absurd Wakefield, who for no discernible reason risks “losing his place forever” and becoming “the Outcast of the Universe,” July’s narrator discovers her true self. On the way, she confronts perimenopause, lesbian desire, the dramas of being a minor celebrity, the tedium of motherhood, birth trauma, and one very interesting thing you can do with a tampon.

One of the pleasures of All Fours is surprise. (I don’t want to ruin it, but again: that tampon!) Another is July’s ability to take everyday experiences and return them strange and new and precisely voiced. When I arrived at a passage about the sadness of seeing the OB/GYN after you are done bearing children, I thought for a moment that July had been reading my texts. What she had to say, though, was far more unexpected. She doesn’t sink into melancholy but indulges in animated speculation, venturing into the odder territories of the mind:

I watched the pregnant woman committedly read her magazine, snug as a bug in a rug, the very center of the universe. To the degree she saw us older women, she pitied us. She was in the midst of something very exciting, very right, and after this phase there would be a baby, and it was unclear what would happen to her after that but probably more good stuff! Better and better! And the woman in her seventies, well, nobody except the doctor knew—or could even conceive of—what was going on between her legs, though I tried and saw gray labia, long and loose, ball sacks emptied of their balls. How did it feel to still be dragging your pussy into this same office, decades after all the reproductive fanfare? She was scrolling on her phone, seemingly unbothered or unaware that she had nothing to look forward to, cunt-wise.

At this doctor’s visit, the narrator learns she is officially perimenopausal. She isn’t so bothered by the idea of menopause until she realizes that one of its symptoms is reduced libido. She can’t lose her sex drive; she just found it! She becomes fixated on having sex with Davey before she stops having sex altogether. Perhaps fixated isn’t the right word. She’s consumed: “I wanted to have sex with him before I died, because after I died I’d have to go on living another 45 years.”

For readers of a certain age, these passages, which capture a romantic longing that is adolescent in its intensity, will provoke self-examination. In one sense, the narrator’s crisis is universal. You only live once—how should you live? Have you made the right calls? Is there time to make different ones? What do you want so much that you’re willing to give everything else up to have it? Yet if the narrator is a delightfully warped Everywoman, she’s also a famous person with time and money to spare, an artistic genius whose self has always been her material. There’s something seductive and fascinating about watching someone shape their life as a project. It’s also alienating and a little weightless. All Fours unfolds in a vacuum where history, politics, and economics don’t exist; the only constraints are desire and will. There’s no sense in this book that a life is something to muddle through, with pockets of happiness and unhappiness along the way, or that a life might be best lived in service to something other than the self. A life in this book is something to be curated, designed, and maximized.

Aging makes the narrator keenly observant of the body, and the body is what powers the book: how they smell and feel, the texture of skin and flesh, what it’s like to dance. Early on, she’s a “mind-rooted” fucker; she describes having sex with Harris as involving so much internal fantasy that it’s like having a screen “clamped over her face.” Eventually, she becomes less thinking and more feeling.

Deterioration is bad, and death is inevitable, though disappearance is what All Fours really fears. The narrator is constantly aware of whether and how she is perceived by others. Although she assumes she’s unseeable or indiscernible like a regular middle-aged wraith, she isn’t. Davey is a fan who loves her work and recognized her right away. The lesson she learns about aging is that, actually, she isn’t too old. The younger guy wanted her all along.

July’s novel is hot and weird and captivating and one of the most entertaining, deranged, and moving depictions of lust and romantic mania I’ve ever read. It speaks frankly about women’s bodies, and she’s a master of sentences. In the end, however, it exudes the off-putting assurance of a convert and steers into the lane of self-help. As the narrator’s marriage evolves, the book falls apart. Her despair and obsession— the stuff of great literature—get diffused into open and honest conversation, scheduling, and lessons learned. Everyone is very mature. This modern solution to the marriage problem may be a good thing in real life, but it can’t pack the classic novelistic wallop of love and death. To some extent, this is a matter of sensibility. Mine—like July’s used to be—is tragic. I don’t think we can solve our lives, or optimize them like an app, and I don’t want art that claims to resolve anxiety with instruction or empowerment. All Fours ends on a note of personal growth with the narrator’s shimmering, unironic declaration that she can overcome the age-old conundrum of not having what you want and not wanting what you have. “I could always be how I was in the room,” she decides. “Imperfect, ungendered, game, unashamed.” It sounds just a little too much like having it all. ■