Instead of a departure, the writer and director Matthew Gasda’s take on “Uncle Vanya” at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research tends to adhere to the original.
Instead of a departure, the writer and director Matthew Gasda’s take on “Uncle Vanya” at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research tends to adhere to the original.
Instead of a departure, the writer and director Matthew Gasda’s take on “Uncle Vanya” at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research tends to adhere to the original.
It’s not easy to capture a social and cultural hub, but the writer and director Matthew Gasda gave it a good try in “Dimes Square” (2022), a play about a small group of denizens from the title Manhattan scene — a tiny enclave that Gasda portrayed as a petri dish of competing insecurities and rivalries.
It makes sense, then, that Gasda is now directing a revival of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” which the writer Jon Robin Baitz once pithily described as “a drama about being driven insane by the sound of other people’s desires, complaints and aspirations when you’re already being tortured by your own.”
Taking place at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research, in Greenpoint, this version bears a title, “Vanya on Huron Street,” that echoes that of the Louis Malle film “Vanya on 42nd Street” (1994). But unlike that mise en abyme of an “Uncle Vanya” production by André Gregory, Gasda’s take is not a revision or a deconstruction, and it is not sustained by spectacular acting, either.
So once again we are back with Sonya (Mia Vallet, the cast’s brightest light), who is desperately in love with Astrov (George Olesky), who pines for Yelena (Asli Mumtas), the wife of an older, pedantic professor (Derrick Peterson, whose gray ponytail does half the characterization work). Sonya’s uncle Vanya (Bob Laine) also holds unrequited lust for Yelena.