The Play

...It is pretty much ordinary common sense, applied with fanciful touch, some highly engaging dialogue, and an intensity of hidden feeling which occasionally leads Barry astray in his technique...

...For Uncle Vanya in its present form is almost entirely the work of its producer...

...He has not only selected these artists with an infallible sense of fitness, but has directed them in a perfection of ensemble almost unknown on Broadway...

...Plays of this sort are, of course, peculiarly difficult to write in a way that maintains complete theatrical illusion...

...But he has failed often enough to account, in some measure, for the confusion the play has created in many minds...

...Little Sonia is in love with the doctor, but he, like Uncle Vanya, has eyes only for the gossamer Helena, whose strangely aloof and quiet suffering under the tyranny of Alexander wins the pity of all...

...To balance the excellence of this male cast, we have Lillian Gish and Joanna Roos in the roles of Helena and Sonia respectively...

...Barry has simply thrown together a group of people, each one of whom is suffering from this spell of an imagined past, and for that reason discontented or disconsolate-even to the point of suicide-with the present...

...Her voice is pleasing and effective and her sense of the stage and complete command of it would do credit to a veteran...

...Harris has made his own, thus establishing himself as one of our few masters of stagecraft...

...It would be impossible to place these two roles in better hands...

...It is as if Chekhov had taken us under an invisible cloak to this strange meeting place of souls, and asked us simply to watch the irony and the pity and the bravery of lives that were not meant to work out their destiny in the here and now...

...The difference in plane between Miss Le Gallienne's productions of Chekhov and this by Jed Harris is simply the difference between unusual excellence and real greatness...

...Their objections to certain details of play structure, to the awkward handling of certain scenes and to one or two incongruous episodes are perhaps well taken...

...With them lives Uncle Vanya, brother of Alexander's first wife, also the first wife's mother and an old housekeeper...

...In many of his scenes on the veranda of an old house overlooking the Mediterranean, Barry has effected this sense of the plausible with considerable skill...

...In the end, Helena and her husband leave for Moscow-each, for very different reasons, finding the country unbearable-and the estate settles down again to the calm it had once known, purified by the suffering and struggle which no one could help and which all have had to face...

...Uncle Vanya, suspecting all, watches Helena...

...One false note, or one character too blatantly played, would break the spell in an instant, leaving the audience bored with the seemingly endless sorrows and frustrations of a group of unimportant people...

...At the Martin Beck Theatre...

...Little Sonia, knowing nothing of the truth, asks Helena's help in her love...

...Chekhov has taken, as usual, a group of people whose lives are strangely mixed up, and drawn simply and vividly the tangle of their emotions...

...They live on a country estate which Alexander has inherited from his first wife...

...The author, of course, has put all the potentials of a great play into his work, but it is the kind of play one should either read or see acted only with the highest perfection...

...But it is the recovery, the great upward sweep from just such moments which gives the play its universal sway and truth...

...In spite of this, I feel it is not only the most ambitious but also, in its essence, by far the finest play Barry has yet had produced...

...The play itself is of that type which is chiefly a skeleton of words...

...The story comes through to us without bitterness and only with deep and vibrant compassion...

...There is the old retired professor, Alexander, whose egotism and selfishness know few bounds, and his young second wife, Helena, only a few years older than his daugter, Sonia...

...It is the first appearance of Lillian Gish on the stage since those first days when her fragile artistry made the motion-picture world gasp...

...Under his direction, Katherine Alexander, Glenn Anders and Earle Larrimore give three splendidly direct and understanding performances...

...It is a play in which fortitude carries the battle of the hour...

...Michael Astroff, a country doctor, is a constant visitor at the estate...

...Walter Connolly, for example, has given us many glimpses during the last few years of an exceptional talent, but in the dogged, pathetic and defeated Uncle Vanya, he gives us such a portrait as only the finest traditions of the stage could equal...

...But its central idea is so simple, so obvious and so coherent that one is amazed at an accusation of vagueness and confusion...

...From every view, this Uncle Vanya is a rare experience in the theatre...

...Now, as Michael Astroff, he has a chance to give full play to his finely balanced mentality as well as to his feeling for proportion...

...We are always imagining the superior beauties of the past and neglecting the precious instants of the here and now...

...In spite of herself, Helena is drawn to the doctor, but not to the point of yielding...

...The play lacks craftsmanship-as if it had been poured out in a torrent...

...It is not a highly subtle idea, nor is it, as several critics hinted, a relic of Freudian psychology...

...Joanna Roos is, as I have maintained in this department for several years, one of our very best younger actresses, capable of unmeasured depths of restrained intensity...

...It is a play of fundamentally strong characters, tried to their innermost depths, and found capable of whatever sacrifices are demanded of them...

...A final note of excellence is supplied by Lee Simonson's Riviera setting...

...In casting, in direction, in appropriate scenic setting, in careful modulation and in perfection of ensemble, it will, I believe, linger long among the memories of modern masterpieces...

...It is the play as a living thing on the stage which Mr...

...Uncle Vanya comes within the technical definition of comedy, but it is more a comedy of the soul, of trial, temptation and purgation, than of externals...

...Ruth Gordon is less appropriately cast, but does passably well in spite of mannerisms which she cannot throw off entirely...

...To Phillip Moeller in particular there should be strong words of delight for what he has accomplished in fusing the frequently scattered elements...

...Tender and mistaken illusions of the past only create a conflict in the present which, sooner or later, attacks the roots of faith, hope and love...

...It is, if one may be permitted to use the word these days, a deeply religious play in the sense that true religion demands an acceptance of present reality as the basis of stalwart faith...

...At the final curtain, Uncle Vanya and his niece, Sonia, are alone, frustrated in all human love but trying bravely to look for consolation toward the eternity after the grave...

...It must be acted superlatively well before it glows with life- acted, that is, by a group of artists who are willing to subordinate every individual impulse to the unifying influence of a director's hand until, with his help, they have endowed it with the quality of a symphony...

...Only such rare masterpieces as Ansky's The Dybbuk are able to lift you from the plane of gross realism to a plane where the supernatural or the extraordinary seems plausible...

...Barry has simply taken the old thought that we are often chained to the past, and so prevented from forging ahead, by the fact that our memory of the past is largely illusion, and that if we can once relive the past in all its stark truth, we recover our faith in the present...

...Franchot Tone and Phyllis Povah are also excellent...

...Eugene Powers gives Alexander just that touch of fatuous dignity which makes his absurd egotism and selfishness credible...

...The stage has been the loser by this long interval...

...Through the device of a mysterious old man, the father of one of the group, Barry has arranged to have a spell cast over all of these discontents through which each one relives the true past and so finds freedom and happiness and a return of lost faith...

...It is no more a play of Uncle Vanya than of Helena or of Sonia or of Michael Astroff...

...It is a play which, due to the completeness and tender sympathy with which Chekhov delineates each character, centers around no one person...

...Uncle Fanya RARELY-speaking in terms of years rather than weeks- Av does New York have the chance to witness so sensitive and moving a performance of any play as Jed Harris's production of Uncle Vanya by Chekhov...

...Harris's work should detract from the praise due her...

...At the Cort Theatre...

...Which fact, of course, brings us back to Jed Harris...

...Miss Le Gallienne has done some notable work in the revival of Chekhov plays, and nothing one feels impelled to say concerning Mr...

...Let some shock or accident bring back the full truth to her mind, and she is at once freed...

...Whichever way she looks, she is torn...

...Then there is Osgood Perkins whose varied career started out with playing nervous ministers, only to switch suddenly to such roughneck and vigorous parts as the city editor in The Front Page...

...To the interpretation of this story, Jed Harris has brought a group of artists, several of whom can now be evaluated at their true worth for the first time...

...There are moments of faltering in the struggle, moments when one or another of these tortured souls is ready to give up, moments so human that only a great master could dare to breathe life into them without risk of desecration...

...Those who think of Jed Harris only as the producer of such flamboyant bits as Broadway and The Front Page, and have forgotten, perhaps, the better moments of Coquette, will find in this extraordinary rendering of a Russian classic the reflection of a surprising personality...

...In other words, a daughter may remember her dead father as one of the most entertaining and fascinating men on earth, forgetting that he was a worthless drunkard and an impossible egotist...