We've got some dialogue to do

A meme! A meme! Seriously, it's been months since I did one of these. Courtesy of thistleingrey:

When you see this, make a post in your journal or in a community. It can be anything: a crosspost of something you've posted on Tumblr, a few words about the last thing you read/watched, or just a "Hi, how is everyone?" Then go read your f-list and leave at least one comment.

The last thing I watched was Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), which I saw tonight at the Coolidge Corner Theatre with derspatchel and my mother.

Due to an insurance-related snafu at the pharmacy, we were desperately late getting onto public transit, so it was through the good graces of my mother that we ate dinner at all: she held down seats at the theater while we ran to the Paris Creperie Café with fifteen minutes to showtime. Let me take a moment here to recommend the Paris Creperie. First of all, their crepes are delicious. I have opinions about the wisdom of bestowing upon a menu names like "The Storming of the Basil," "Kale'n It," and "Gorgonyolo," but I ordered a crepe with goat cheese, smoked salmon, spinach, and black pepper, and it was magnificent—"infusions" sounds pretentious but turns out to mean they put whatever you choose in the crepe batter, so I had a black pepper crepe—and Rob seemed very happy with his Lumber-Jacques, which just looked like serious breakfast food, and that counts for more with me than the apparent belief that what this world really needs is a pretzel-based dessert called "No Regretzel." (Also, I am genuinely amused by "The Affectation—You'll Be a Harvard Man in One Bite.") Secondly, we had fifteen minutes to eat. We had plates in front of us within five minutes. We had time to not bolt our food. This also counts for a lot with me, especially at the end of a difficult day. And they made Rob some kind of perfectly reasonable peanut-butter-and-chocolate smoothie and I ordered a Nutella hot chocolate out of curiosity and next time I will remember that the Creperie's idea of a large hot chocolate is, in fact, gigantic. I mean, it was very nice hazelnut-flavored hot milk chocolate. It was also more Nutella than I have eaten in a year. Possibly ever. Je ne regrette rien. We made a point of thanking the servers and telling them we were coming back. Behind us, as we left the restaurant, we could hear them saying happily, "They loved it! They loved it!" I think increasingly I feel strongly that when people serve you good food, you should tell them. Mediocre food is a thing and people should always know that's not what they're delivering.

My only previous Uncle Vanya was the Apollinaire Theatre Company's in 2012, about which I failed to post at the time. The most I've got is an e-mail note to ashlyme: "I've never seen another production of the play, but I thought it was great. Chelsea Theatre Works is a former Elks lodge, a huge four- or five-story building full of wrought iron and pressed aluminum ceilings and old telephone exchanges; each act moved to a different room, so naturalistically that I was surprised when the lights came down at the close of the play. Closer and closer, pressing you in to the characters, so you can get out of their lives as little as they can. And the acting was very sound. As a birthday present, it was a definite success." I can now see how Vanya on 42nd Street influenced that approach, but the divergences were as much of interest to me as the lines of descent or the bones of the play itself. I prefer Ron Lacey's dreamier, more ironic Astrov, partly because it makes the margin by which he misses Sonya's affections both more plausible and more frustrating; on the other hand, Julianne Moore's Yelena almost warps the play around herself, because that glacial idleness of hers is so devastatingly the resignation of despair, equal to all of Vanya's shouting about Schopenhauer—she is too intelligent to be married to a man who asks nothing from her but her youth and beauty and too ethical to play the siren that both Vanya and Astrov are looking for and she exits the play with the husband she's already admitted she hasn't loved in years, because it is the responsible thing to remove herself from the situation, never mind where that leaves her (still with Serebryakov, whose self-pity extends to preemptively rejecting his wife because of their age difference even when she tries to show affection: a damning reinforcement of her status as "trophy" before "wife"). Especially as the play gathers to her concluding speech, Brooke Smith exerts a similar gravity as Sonya, to the point where she began to feel to me like a greater tragedy than her uncle. He is spectacularly failing to cope with the disappointments his life has turned into; she is coping at the limit of her capabilities and the only people who notice are the ones who can make no difference. Just because she doesn't try to shoot anyone doesn't mean she isn't suffering.

This is not to indicate that Wallace Shawn is an unconvincing Vanya. It's been true of both productions I've seen, so I assume it is Chekhov that the audience should alternate between sympathizing with Vanya and wanting to smack him silly, and Shawn nails the comic frustration and the self-disgusted intelligence as well as the less agreeable sides of the character, the egotism of his unhappiness ("How hard it is for me," he mourns to Sonya, "if you knew how hard it is for me. You can't know," when the girl knows achingly well what it means to look forward to nothing but days of loveless and unappreciated work; her uncle may have wasted the best years of his life administering his brother-in-law's estate, but it's been the entirety of hers), the pushiness of his ten-year torch-carrying, the relentless, pointless passive-aggressive needling that starts with his mother and spills over onto anyone within earshot. Perhaps that's the point. He's not sympathetic because he's a secret, stifled genius or because of the grand passion he's nurtured all these years, but because he's a person and he's in a terrible place and he's hurting. He is also, when he fails to shoot Serebryakov—twice—extremely funny, and he knows it and that makes it worse.

(I suspect it will never cease to amuse me that the fame of Chekhov's gun notwithstanding, the gunshots in Uncle Vanya come completely out of nowhere. No one in that house even mentions owning a gun. Given the tensions and depressions running through that household, it's almost surprising that it takes until the third act to go off.)

I have also realized, after these two productions, that I have a very definite mental fix-it for the play: I hope, and see no reason it should not happen, that Serebryakov with his peevishness and his hypochondria gives himself some kind of massive coronary and drops dead in the next year, leaving the estate to revert to his daughter. There may be nothing to be done about the tangled lines of attraction, but everyone not having to drive themselves broke each month should help.

Aaaagh, it's four in the morning. End of meme. I'm going to bed.