• Introduction
• Core Curriculum Standards
• Plot Description
• Character Profiles
• Glossary of Terms

• About Anton Chekhov
• What is "Chekhovian"?
• The Russia of Uncle Vanya
• Talking with Anton Chekhov

• Cast of Uncle Vanya
• Director Emily Mann
• Spotlight on Craft: Acting Chekhov
• Related Materials

• Pre-Show Questions
• Translation in the Classroom
• After the Show

To end our 2002-2003 season, Emily Mann follows up the success of her 2000 production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard with an original translation of one of Chekhov's most delicate plays. Tracking the intertwined lives of a family living a provincial Russian life, Uncle Vanya is a study of humor, hope and loss - loss of romantic love, of ambition, of ideals, of illusions. Mann's production of this classic play illuminates the realities that must be faced when one is forced to look honestly at one's own life. It is a coming-of-age story of sorts, except that the protagonist is already middle-aged when he comes into mature self-awareness. Though the play is over a hundred years old, Uncle Vanya probes at the central questions of human nature proving that these questions are both timeless and universal and that Chekhov's understanding of them is as acute as ever.

In the following pages of this guide you will find background information and historical references about the genesis of Chekhov's work and McCarter's production of this legendary play. Use the sections of this guide and the study questions provided to help prepare your students to experience this production of Uncle Vanya.

The Visual and Performing Arts are considered Core Curriculum areas for the New Jersey State Department of Education. This production of Uncle Vanya is designed to give your students exposure to the specific Core Curriculum Standards listed below.

Uncle Vanya and Curriculum Standards

This production of Uncle Vanya and related study materials will provide students with specific knowledge and skills to address the following Core Curriculum Content Standards in the Arts:

Uncle Vanya is also designed to address the following Core Curriculum Standards in Language Arts Literacy:

A retired professor, with his beautiful young wife, Yelena, has returned to his country estate. The estate originally belonged to his first wife (now deceased), whose mother, daughter Sonya, and brother Vanya still live there and manage the farm. The professor calls the doctor (Astrov) to treat his gout, only to send him away without seeing him. Astrov is an experienced physician who performs his job conscientiously, but spends much of his time drinking.

The presence of Yelena introduces sexual tension into the household. Astrov and Vanya both fall in love with her. Unfortunately, Sonya is secretly in love with Astrov, who fails even to notice her. Yelena attempts to help Sonya's cause but is unsuccessful as she struggles to deny her own attraction to Astrov. When the professor gathers the family together to announce his plans to sell the estate, Vanya protests, saying that he has spent his best years working the land for the professor's benefit. Vanya storms out, and Yelena and the professor both go after him. Suddenly a shot is heard. The professor runs in, followed by Vanya who fires a second shot. After a pause, it becomes clear he has missed the professor twice.

The professor and Yelena decide to move out, and Vanya asserts that "everything will be just as it was." Before departing, Yelena confesses to the doctor that she is a "little bit" in love with him. Yelena and an apologetic Vanya share a brief farewell, and Vanya tells her that they will never see each other again. Vanya and Sonya return to their long-deferred work. Shortly thereafter Astrov departs as well.

Sonya tells Vanya that they must endure their trials and focus on their work. She conjures a vision of the heaven that awaits them; her uncle weeps. The play closes with her repeated refrain "We shall rest... we shall rest!"

Born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, Russia, on the Sea of Azov, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov would eventually become one of Russia's most cherished storytellers. The son of a grocer and the grandson of a serf, young Chekhov began working at an early age in his father's grocery store. When his father fled Taganrog in 1876 to escape his creditors, 16-year-old Chekhov was left to care for his home and family, which included his mother and three younger siblings. Just as he was later to depict in The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov's own family home and shop were auctioned off.

Anton Chekhov's Family Home

In 1879 Chekhov enrolled as a medical student at the University of Moscow. During his years in school he wrote humorous stories and sketches under a pen name to help support his family. After graduating in 1884 with a degree in medicine, he began to freelance as a journalist and writer of comic sketches. Early in his career, he mastered the form of the one-act and produced several masterpieces of this genre including The Bear (1888) in which a creditor hounds a young widow, but becomes so impressed when she agrees to fight a duel with him that he proposes marriage, and The Wedding (1889) in which a bridegroom's plans to have a general attend his wedding ceremony backfire when the general turns out to be a retired naval captain "of the second rank."

By 1887 Chekhov was a literary success in St. Petersburg. His first play, Ivanov, a fairly immature work compared to his later plays, examines the suicide of a young man very similar to Chekhov himself in many ways. His next play, The Wood Demon (1888) was also fairly unsuccessful. In fact, it was not until the Moscow Art Theater production of The Seagull (1897) that Chekhov enjoyed his first overwhelming success. The same play had been performed two years earlier at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg and had been so badly received that Chekhov had actually left the auditorium during the second act and vowed never to write for the theatre again. But in the hands of the Moscow Art Theatre, the play was transformed into a critical success.

Though Chekhov suffered illness throughout most of his life (he suffered his first lung hemorrhage at the age of 24) he continued to enjoy critical success and make his living as a writer of short stories and plays. By 1892 he was able to fulfill his lifelong dram of buying an estate at Melikhovo, near Moscow. There he entertained himself with gardening, planting entire forests and a cherry orchard of his own. It is during his stay in Melikhovo, that Chekhov wrote The Seagull, which brought him to the attention of the Moscow Art Theatre. In 1898 Chekhov saw the actress Olga Knipper in a production there and soon after wrote to a friend, "Were I to stay in Moscow, I would fall in love with her." By 1901 Chekhov and Knipper were married.

Anton Chekhov

In 1899, Chekhov gave the Moscow Art Theatre a revised version of The Wood Demon, now titled Uncle Vanya (1899). Along with The Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904), this play would go on to become one of the masterpieces of the modern theatre. However, although the Moscow Art Theatre productions brought Chekhov great fame, he was never quite happy with the style that director Constantin Stanislavsky imposed on the plays. While Chekhov insisted that most of his plays were comedies, Stanislavsky's productions tended to emphasize their tragic elements. Still, in spite of their stylistic disagreements, it was not an unhappy marriage, and these productions brought widespread acclaim to both Chekhov's work and the Moscow Art Theatre itself.

Chekhov considered his mature plays to be a kind of comic satire, pointing out the unhappy nature of existence in turn-of-the-century Russia. Perhaps Chekhov's style was described best by the poet himself when he wrote:

"All I wanted was to say honestly to people: 'Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!' The important thing is that people should realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves. I will not live to see it, but I know that it will be quite different, quite unlike our present life."

During Chekhov's final years, he was forced to live in exile from the intellectuals of Moscow. In March of 1897, he had suffered a lung hemorrhage, and although he still made occasional trips to Moscow to participate in the productions of his plays, he was forced to spend most of his time in the Crimea, where he had gone for his health. He died of tuberculosis on July 14, 1904, at the age of forty-four, in a German health resort and was buried in Moscow. Since his death, Chekhov's plays have become famous world wide and he has come to be considered the greatest Russian storyteller and dramatist of modern times.

Anton Chekhov

Despite his early death, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) left a major body of short stories and plays, and in both forms continued to examine the minutiae of everyday experience. The characters in his four great plays - The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya (1897), The Three Sisters (1900), and The Cherry Orchard (1904) - rarely experience definitive revelations of truth. However dreadful the events encompassed in his plays, including lovers separated and families dispossessed, and death by duel and by suicide, Chekhov maintains so fine an emotional balance that his characters are simultaneously tragic and comic, pathetic and ridiculous.

In a way, Chekhov's achievement brought the early modern drama to an impasse. Like Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg, he identified a series of social and personal problems that defined a seemingly worldwide collapse of central authority as the twentieth century evolved. His work, however, proposes neither a rationale nor a resolution for that collapse. In fact, the short stories and plays of Chekhov convince us that, no matter how intimately we may probe character, the human condition remains mysterious. To that sense of mystery, lovingly and realistically examined yet unexplained, only one word can be assigned: "Chekhovian."

Anton Chekhov

Chekhov's plays, scrupulously observed depictions of ineffectual lives endured in dreary provincial towns, were produced in extraordinarily detailed sets by one of the most important acting ensembles of modern times, The Moscow Art Theatre. Under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), this group introduced a new acting method that confirmed the real source of energy in nineteenth-century realism. Although Stanislavsky did not stint on stage reproductions of reality, he knew that external realistic portrayal in and of itself lacked value. The true subject of the great realists was the human soul. Convinced that the brilliantly artificial acting styles required by high poetic drama did not fit the differently scaled speeches of unheroic dramatic characters, Stanislavsky resolved to re-train his company. Stanislavsky-influenced rehearsals require that cast members focus on emotional exercises designed to arouse within them personal feelings that replicate the characters'. The goal of theatre was no longer, as Aristotle had described it long ago, to imitate an action but literally to enact it. Ultimately, the development of theatre in the twentieth century reveals that in the very success of Stanislavsky's method lay the seeds of its rejection. As with every art form, once theatrical realism totally fulfilled its mission, the genre began to seem obsolete, and gradually gave way to a new phase of modern theatre.

from MODERN DRAMA by Paula S. Berggren, Barbara Gluck, Robert S. Rosen, Marshall J. Schneider, John Brenkman

In the 19th century, Russia was ruled by a Czar, an absolute ruler who exercised a huge amount of power over his subjects. Nineteenth-century Russia was a place of tremendous political, social, and intellectual ferment: there were frequent peasant uprisings, secret societies of intellectuals met to discuss new social and political theories, and the autocratic rule of the Czar and his instruments of repression (censorship, the secret police, and the Siberian prison camps) was increasingly questioned by all classes.

The great majority of the country was still rural; much of it was divided into large estates that were owned by noble families and farmed by serfs. Serfs were not actually slaves, since they retained a claim to the land based on their and their forebears' uninterrupted possession of it. However, they were bound to that land, unable to move freely or even marry without their owner's permission. The serfs often lived and worked in conditions of appalling poverty. In 1861 Tsar Alexander II issued a decree freeing Russia's 22.5 million peasants from serfdom. The freedom had mixed results for the former serfs; some left the rural estates, found work in towns, and made money; others were even worse off than before. Each ex-serf householder was made the owner of his cabin and a small garden plot around it; but the huge estates were divided. One half was returned to the direct possession of the former serf-owners; the rest was handed over, not to the peasants individually, but to the local village community. For millions of former serfs, the freedom resulted in a loss of security because their ex-masters no longer had legal responsibility for them.

There were, of course, social classes in 19th century Russia other than landowners and peasants. For example, there was the intelligentsia, represented in Uncle Vanya by Serebryakov. Intellectuals have historically played an important role as leaders and artists in Eastern Europe. There was great intellectual upheaval in 19th century Russia. Intellectuals were keenly aware of the backwardness of Russia, and keen to remedy it by various schemes. In addition to the intellectuals, there was a nascent middle class of businessmen who emerged at this time. These men, who understood the rules of business, recognized that they could become the equals of higher-class families. This could only be accomplished, however, by exploiting members of their own former class. In the 19th century the number of such businessmen was small, but Chekhov was well aware that in Western Europe these businessmen were key to economic progress. Ironically, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was destined to sweep away both the idle Russian nobility and the blossoming middle-class.

Anton Chekhov reads to an attentive audience.

This excerpt is taken from a reminiscence of Chekhov written by Maxim Gorky many years after Chekhov's death (1921). Russian dramatist Maxim Gorky was a contemporary of Chekhov's, whose unfailing interest in creative personalities and his profound knowledge of the times producing these personalities, enabled him to penetrate the mysteries of such complex and self-contradictory individuals as Tolstoy, Chekhov, Korolenko, and many others.

Once he invited me to the village Koutchouk-Koy where he had a tiny strip of land and a white, two-storied house. There while showing me his "estate", he began to speak with animation: "If I had plenty of money, I should build a sanatorium here for invalid village teachers. You know, I would put up a large, bright building - very bright, with large windows and lofty rooms. I would have a fine library, different musical instruments, bees, a vegetable garden, an orchard. ... There would be lectures on agriculture, mythology. ... Teachers ought to know everything, everything, my dear fellow."

He was suddenly silent, coughed, looked at me out of the corners of his eyes, and smiled that tender, charming smile of his which attracted one so irresistibly to him and made one listen so attentively to his words.

"Does it bore you to listen to my fantasies? I do love to talk of it. ... If you knew how badly the Russian village needs a nice, sensible, educated teacher! We ought in Russia to give the teacher particularly good conditions, and it ought to be done as quickly as possible. We ought to realize that without a wide education of the people, Russia will collapse, like a house built of badly baked bricks. A teacher must be an artist, in love with his calling; but with us he is a journeyman, ill educated, who goes to the village to teach children as though he were going into exile. He is starved, crushed, terrorized by the fear of losing his daily bread. But he ought to be the first man in the village; the peasants ought to recognize him as a power, worthy of attention and respect; no one should dare to shout at him or humiliate him personally, as with us every one does - the village constable, the rich shop-keeper, the priest, the rural police commissioner, the school guardian, the councilor, and that official who has the title of school-inspector, but who cares nothing for the improvement of education and only sees that the circulars of his chiefs are carried out. ... It is ridiculous to pay in farthings the man who has to educate the people. It is intolerable that he should walk in rags, shiver with cold in damp and draughty schools, catch cold, and about the age of thirty get laryngitis, rheumatism, or tuberculosis. We ought to be ashamed of it. Our teacher, for eight or nine months in the year, lives like a hermit: he has no one to speak a word to; without company, books or amusements, he is growing stupid, and, if he invites his colleagues to visit him, then he becomes politically suspect - a stupid word with which crafty men frighten fools. All this is disgusting; it is the mockery of a man who is doing a great and tremendously important work. ... Do you know, whenever I see a teacher, I feel ashamed for him, for his timidity, and because he is badly dressed ... it seems to me that for the teacher's wretchedness I am myself to blame - I mean it."

He was silent, thinking; and then, waving his hand, he said gently: "This Russia of ours is such an absurd, clumsy country."

A shadow of sadness crossed his beautiful eyes; little rays of wrinkles surrounded them and made them look still more meditative. Then, looking round, he said jestingly: "You see, I have fired off at you a complete leading article from a radical paper. Come, I'll give you tea to reward your patience."

This article by Maxim Gorky was originally published in Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf. B. W. Huebsch: New York: 1921.

The work of Anton Chekhov has attracted actors from its earliest days on the stage. Why is this the case? Is it the depth of emotion that exists in all of Chekhov's work? Is it the truth of humanity that one finds beneath the everyday lives of his characters? McCarter's Education Department was lucky enough to grab a few moments with actors Michael Siberry and Natacha Roi who play Astrov and Yelena respectively in this production. With two weeks of rehearsal already under their belts, here is what these actors had to say about approaching Uncle Vanya and about working on this particular production.

ED: What attracts an actor to Chekhov?

Michael Siberry

Michael: Chekhov is wonderful because it is both difficult and true. It seems that every time any of his plays are adapted by someone else what comes through is an eloquence and a very accurate portrayal of human nature - of the way people behave, the way people are, the way they are in relationships - and these things are so beautifully observed. It is very satisfying for an actor to deal with something that has this kind of emotional through-line to it that expresses emotional problems beautifully, poetically, eloquently. It is challenging for an actor because Chekhov has more in it that you can possibly know. It grows and changes even in every performance because of what you are going through emotionally and how that expresses itself. That is what makes the work so rewarding.

Natacha: One of the beauties of Chekhov is that it is written in such a way that it really does portray the messiness of human nature. We are so guarded, and these characters are also, but at the same time they are like a volcano of emotion with both laughter and crying and all of that always underneath the skin at all times. This is the way it is in real life too. You know when somebody looks at you wrong at a certain time and you will suddenly just well up or you'll be deeply pained? But, because we are so guarded against that we don't express or acknowledge it. What Chekhov does is that he allows the characters to be able to show that. They show the vulnerability and the emotional life that the characters have and that human nature has.

ED: You are now in the third week of rehearsal. How are you feeling about the work and where do you feel you are at in the process of bringing this play to life?

Natacha: I think that in the first two weeks of rehearsal you feel good because you figure out where you are and what your blocking is and you learn your lines and then the third week is about how do I make this person real. What are the little subtleties, the little bubbles of life that go a million miles a minute in every single moment, that is basically what you are trying figure out. It's all those bubbles that make a character three-dimensional. So this part of the process is really about deepening the character. In terms of the Astrov/Yelena relationship there is so much that is said in code and they are so torn, at least Yelena is. She feels so many things so strongly - her loyalty to Serebryakov, her longing for what she can't have, the desire to be the good wife - and all these things and more coexist at the same time, so the issue becomes which one of these emotions is going to surface in each moment. That's what I'm figuring out now and it's why I use the metaphor of the bubbles because you are always just at the boiling point.

Michael: And all of these characters have choices. Astrov and Yelena certainly do. Chekhov so often in his plays brings up situations where characters can go either this way or that way and inevitably they kind of miss. They don't take the choice that seems to be coming. It's terribly sad, but at the same time terribly funny. There are all sorts of complications that screw you up that keep you from saying something like, "I want to do this, so I'll do it."

Natacha Roi

Natacha: There are very few real people that actually do make the brave choice. So many of us justify it really well and therefore we make the choice that is just a little bit more comfortable rather than the one that is more exhilerating but might blow your life to pieces. The fear factor really governs human nature. The fear of getting hurt, the fear of not being happy - sometimes these fears cause you to make the wrong choice. And the audience is yearning for you to make the exhilerating choice.

ED: There have been so many productions of this play in the past hundred years. How do you create something that is new or distinct?

Michael: There are thousands of different ways to play this material and it really is a matter of coming together with this particular group of people and doing this particular version. Every actor's interpretation depends on the person they are playing against. How they are in a particular scene affects the way you are. You are making choices all the time in the work, but you also reflect off each other. Chekhov really is such ensemble work. And, of course, you have a director there and with her guidance you do make choices. Part of those choices is what's brought to the table but the other part of those choices is what happens in the rehearsal room. You can really always turn Chekhov on its head.

ED: The play contains so many long speeches, how do you figure out the pacing of those moments?

Natacha: Right now I don't know the pacing. I think that is why you have third and fourth week of rehearsal, to figure that out. Chekhov is so rich in the way he writes that sometimes you'll take a left turn and you'll think, "Where is that coming from?" That's real life. So, at first you try to take it really slow to make sure you aren't missing anything and then suddenly you find yourself in a long, self-absorbed monologue and then you need to try and speed it up to find out what fits and what doesn't. With my particular monologue we just realized that it flies off the page when you give it rhythm because Yelena's brain is going in many different directions. She has all these dreams that died when she married Serebryakov but those things are still there, they are just buried. All that comes up unexpectedly in those moments and in those monologues.

ED: On the page these characters can be mistaken for dreary and without humor. What changes when you bring the characters to life on stage?

Michael: The joy of Chekhov is that it's funny and it's tragic so that one person in the audience can be in tears and the person next to them can be hysterical laughing. And life is like that. The play becomes melodrama if it is all grief and pain. Chekhov is not like that. He slaps you in the face if you start to get too melancholy. The play should be, I think, in some ways like a Coen brothers movie (Fargo, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, Big Lebowski). It is that absurd. Because sometimes the play is terribly sad, but it is also ridiculous because the characters have gone too far. And in that it becomes both terrible and hilarious all at the same time. The danger of this work is that it can become too moody. As an actor you have to know how to go down these emotional roads in a way that lets the audience get there before you do so that they feel it rather than watch it. That's why Chekhov moves people.

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

INTERNET

The Anton Chekhov Page
TheatreHistory.com
Anton Chekhov Biography
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

BOOKS

Aiken, Conrad, Collected Criticism, Oxford University Press, 1968.
Avilova, Lydia, Chekhov in My Life: A Love Story, translation by David Magarshack, Greenwood Press, 1971.
Bitsili, Petr M., Chekhov's Art: A Stylistic Analysis, translation by T. W. Clyman and E. J. Cruise, Ardis Press, 1983.
Bruford, W. H., Anton Chekhov, Yale University Press, 1957.
Clyman, Toby W., editor, A Chekhov Companion, Greenwood Press, 1985.
Erneljanow, Victor, editor, Chekhov: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
Gilman, Richard, Chekhov's Plays: An Opening into Eternity, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1995.
Gorky, Maksim, Alexander Kuprin, and I. A. Bunin, Reminiscences of Anton Chekhov, translation by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, B. W. Huebsch, 1921.
Hahn, Beverly, Chekhov: A Study of the Major Stories and Plays, Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Hingley, Ronald, Chekhov: A Biographical and Critical Study, Oxford University Press, 1950.
Hingley, Ronald, A New Life of Anton Chekhov, Knopf, 1976.
Jackson, Robert Louis, editor, Chekhov: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1967.
Karlinsky, Simon, editor, Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, translation by Karlinsky and Michael Henry Heim, University of California Press, 1975.
Magarshack, David, Chekhov: A Life, Greenwood Press, 1952, reprinted, 1970.
Magarshack, David, The Real Chekhov: An Introduction to Chekhov's Last Plays, Allen & Unwin, 1972.
Rayfield, Donald, Chekhov: The Evolution of His Art, Barnes & e, 1975.
Simmons, Ernest J., Chekhov: A Biography, University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Styan, J. L., Chekhov in Performance, Cambridge University Press, 1971.
Toumanova, Nina Andronikova, Anton Chekhov: Voice of Twilight Russia, Columbia University Press, 1937.
Watson, Ian, Chekhov's Journey, Carroll and Graf (New York City), 1989.

1) Introduce the life of Anton Chekhov to your students. Include a brief description of Russian life in Chekhov's time. Ask your class to describe or present how they imagine the set, lights and costumes will look. Stress the use of color, texture, shape and space.

2) Using the Character Profiles and Plot Description provided in this guide, have your students create short improvisational dialogues between the following sets of characters: Yelena and Vanya, Astrov and Sonya, Sonya and Yelena and Astrov and Vanya.

3) Select a scene from Uncle Vanya to read in class with different students playing different characters. How is the reading of the scene different from the improvisational exercises? Do the characters always say what they feel? Use this exercise to introduce the idea of subtext.

4) Using the same scene from above, assign your students the task of re-writing the scene, adding lines that say what they imagine each character's subtext would be. You can do this in groups, assigning each group a particular character from the play. Play the new scene in class and discuss the difference between the original scene and the new scene. How will the subtext affect the way the actors play the parts?

Investigate these two different translations of the end of Act I of Uncle Vanya. Discuss what the significant differences are and how translations help to define different productions.

translation by Marion Fell

HELENA. That doctor has a sensitive, weary face - an interesting face. Sonia evidently likes him, and she is in love with him, and I can understand it. This is the third time he has been here since I have come, and I have not had a real talk with him yet or made much of him. He thinks I am disagreeable. Do you know, Ivan, the reason you and I are such friends? I think it is because we are both lonely and unfortunate. Yes, unfortunate. Don't look at me in that way, I don't like it.

VOITSKI. How can I look at you otherwise when I love you? You are my joy, my life, and my youth. I know that my chances of being loved in return are infinitely small, do not exist, but I ask nothing of you. Only let me look at you, listen to your voice -

HELENA. Hush, some one will overhear you. [They go toward the house.]

VOITSKI. [Following her] Let me speak to you of my love, do not drive me away, and this alone will be my greatest happiness!

HELENA. Ah! This is agony!

translation by Emily Mann

YELENA: The doctor has an interesting face - very sensitive, somewhat weary... Sonya clearly likes him. She's in love with him; I can understand that. This is the third time he's been here since I've come and I haven't had a chance to have a real talk with him, but I'm shy, of course, and I haven't really known how to encourage him of show him any real attention. I'm afraid he thinks I'm disagreeable. Do you know, Vanya, why you and I are friends?... Because we are both lonely, uninteresting people. Yes... lonely and uninteresting. Don't look at me like that, I've told you I don't like it.

VANYA: How else can I look at you when I am madly in love with you? You are my happiness, my life, my youth. I know that the chances of your loving me are very, very, slim, I know that - all right, there is no chance of your loving me - but just let me look at you, just let me stay here and listen to you -

YELENA: Be quiet, someone will hear you! (They move toward the house.)

VANYA: (going after her) Just let me tell you how much I love you. Don't drive me away, Yelena. I have no other happiness but you!

YELENA: Vanya, my God! This is unbearable!

1) Do you think this play is a comedy, a tragedy or some other category? What would you call that new category? Support your claim with details from the performance.

2) Director Emily Mann and Set Designer Michael Yergen talk about the movement of this play as a stripping away, a journey from the outside inward. What does this mean to you in terms of the performance? What did you see physically in the design that supported this concept? What happened emotionally to the characters in the play that you saw as an "inward journey"?

3) Discuss the idea of subtext with your class. Was the subtext of the characters clear? What in the staging and in the acting made the subtext clear?

4) Discuss the theme of disillusionment in Uncle Vanya. Which characters suffer from disillusionment? How does it affect their behaviors and relationships? In what contemporary works of art and/or literature do we see characters struggling with this same issue?