STAGE REVIEW : An Actor-Friendly ‘Uncle Vanya’ at Old Globe

Director Jack O’Brien’s notes in the program for “Uncle Vanya” at the Old Globe go on at length about returning the theater to its actors--getting it away from technical effect.

It is a plea for purity. A cry for a return to basics. Technical wizardry has its place (as in the late John Hirsch’s wizardly “Coriolanus” two seasons ago), but what O’Brien wants is power for the people: a theater that depends on the wizardry created by its actors.

To achieve this takes actors plus. It takes a director who loves and knows them, a playwright who can smile at the contradictions of the human heart. Call him Chekhov. Put it all together. Spell it “Uncle Vanya.” And there you have it: vulnerable and unadulterated.

“Vanya” is a difficult play. A shadowy, rich, elusive play full of melancholia and stillness and anger and explosion. In short, classic Chekhov, complete with country estate a million miles from anywhere, inhabited by isolated souls dying of boredom and yearning.

Owner of the spread is Serebryakov (Richard Kneeland), aging pedant and self-centered professor married to the languid, willowy Yelena (Carolyn McCormick), not much older than his daughter.

Plain-Jane daughter Sonya (Lynne Griffin) and her uncle Vanya (Richard Easton), brother to her mother, run the estate, which is variously inhabited by Vanya’s mother (Patricia Fraser), the old nursemaid, Marina (Katherine McGrath) and old serf Telegin (Jonathan McMurtry).

The Chekhovian alter ego here is Astrov (Byron Jennings), the drop-in doctor, sentimental realist and some time poseur . Sonya loves Astrov. Astrov loves Yelena. Vanya loves Yelena. Yelena doesn’t know who she loves.

This revolving landscape is as pockmarked as old Telegin’s face with tell-tale exclamation. “Within this tomb . . . surrounded by fools,” sniffs the insupportable Serebryakov. “The time I let slip through my fingers!” wails idle, unhappy Vanya. “I don’t like people,” Astrov growls flatly. “If you knew how miserable I feel,” says . . . well, practically everyone. “September already; how are we going to get through the winter?,” moans the anguished Yelena, voicing what’s on everybody’s mind. You have to laugh. And you do.

These are the clues, signposts in the mine field of human relations. O’Brien creeps up on his script. Things move slowly at first, only taking flight in the confrontational scene between Sonya and Yelena, who iron out their differences by trading confidences and dissolving into tears for entirely different reasons. “I’m so happy,” exclaims Sonya, weeping, as the women unhappily embrace.

The production is rich in such specific and contradictory detail. O’Brien has chosen to place his actors--as promised--center stage in dim, often unilateral light (designed by Peter Maradudin), on a confining partial set (by Hugh Landwehr). Its atmosphere is deliberately claustrophobic. A boxing ring of the emotions. Oddments of furniture litter the edges of stage. And actors wander in and out, on and off, sometimes altering costume in full view of the audience, the mechanics of their trade exposed--the better to impress us with their leap of faith.

In all major respects, this is a carefully modulated, fragile staging, sad and ludicrous at once, a paradox of delicacy and clumsiness, with Jennings turning in an astringent Astrov, pickled in vodka yet capable, when sober, of the emotional transports of a child (as in the map scene). His exchanges with the wavering McCormick are delightful, as much thanks to his sudden boyish flounderings as to the unexpected humor in her wan, expertly timed responses--and to the erotic undercurrents that travel between them.

Everyone in the cast is commendable, from Kneeland’s overbearing Serebryakov, to Griffin’s beautifully etched, thanklessly earnest Sonya (though McMurtry, in excessive makeup, is too fine an actor to waste as the peripheral Telegin). But it is Easton, in the tile role, who takes it away. His Vanya is a tortured, blundering wreck, an emotional powder keg on a fuse, waiting to ignite.

His explosion is bewildering, but the performance will live in the memory for another, subtler reason: When he enters the room with flowers for Yelena and finds her in Astrov’s arms. Easton drops the flowers, pulls off his glasses and dashes them to the ground, as if the sight had turned them to fire and they were searing his flesh.

That’s an actor’s moment.

“Ours is a theater of words and imagination--and that is the province, the sole province of the actor,” O’Brien wrote in the “Vanya” program. He wasn’t kidding.

At the Simon Edison Centre for the Performing Arts in Balboa Park, Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 18. Tickets: $17.50-$27.50; (619) 231-2255).