Vanya On The Plains

In this post which I will not call a “review” for obvious reasons, I will abandon all pretense to “objectivity” which is an overrated concept anyway. One of the reasons I haven’t tried to attach my current theatre writing to an existing website or publication this time, even though I could use the money, is that I want complete freedom to express whatever thoughts I have. I’ve played both sides of the fence over the years, both as a theatre creator and as a reviewer, but above all as an enthusiastic audience member. I love watching plays, which is why my current subject is calibrated to hit me in precisely every feel. The Artistic Home’s current production Vanya On the Plains is a play which I have watched grow from its infancy. I was one of the first people to read it. Its author, Jason Hedrick was a friend and colleague of mine at Southern Illinois University Carbondale where we took the same playwriting classes with Dr. Jacob Juntunen. There were a lot of talented people in that group, who wrote some really good scripts. My own, I like to think, were okay. But the first time we read Vanya On The Plains aloud in class I knew I’d been exposed to something special. Something magic. Infuriatingly so as along with passionate admiration for my colleague I experienced murderous envy as well. I wish my humble powers could conjure a narrative so intelligent, so moving, so sad and funny and imaginative and human as this. 
The natural blending of the melancholy with the hilarious is a challenge too great for most writers to attempt, but Hedrick achieves it, with obvious inspiration from Anton Chekov. The play is an adaptation of Chekov’s 1899 Uncle Vanya but also an extremely well realized science fiction dystopia.

I was not alone in my feeling for the play. It was so popular that two different departments, Theater then Communications, each performed it in consecutive semesters. The Theater Department performed a staged reading as part of the Big Muddy New Play Festival in the Spring of 2017, then the Communications Department sponsored a full production with a somewhat different cast that fall. Hedrick directed the production himself and I know him to be an extremely gifted director as well as writer. I seriously kind of hate this guy. So already loving the script, the bar was set high for the Artistic Home production to see if they would do it justice and I am pleased to report they did. Isaac Asimov is credited with dividing science fiction into three questions, “What if?” “If only” and “If this goes on”. Hedrick’s play explores the third question. In the vaguely mid to late 21st Century world of the play, our present mania for social media and virtual worlds has transcended screens and been directly implanted in our brains. Characters take “The Dive”, entering their immersive simulations and not quite coming back. People still live together and talk to each other. Sort of. But it’s clear most of the characters (excepting the older ones) live more in the “unreal” world than the “real” one.  what was North America is divided between “The Plains”, peaceful and relatively comfortable and “The Outlands”, very much not. A totalitarian government monitors signs of dissent and makes sure people don’t stray too far into the physical world. All of this is background information that unfolds slowly and informs the milieu of the play but has little to do with the main action, one of the many things I love about it. Like Chekov, who wrote against a backdrop of Czarist tyranny and rising Bolshevism, Hedrick creates a kind of tragicomedy of manners mostly isolated from the truly horrific things he continually implies are happening offstage. This is a rich, complicated world that serves the rather simple story without ever overtaking it. Our protagonist is Elijah (Frank Nall) an old man who still remembers the old world. He never took the Dive himself though he is employed by the aforementioned totalitarian government as a “content moderator”, a real job that exists today. His job is to stop the most horrific and violent images, decapitations, disembowelments and such, from reaching people’s view. He is quite rattled by this experience and employs a singularly odd therapist (?) named Barry (Eric Simon) to discuss his traumas with. But Elijah finds his main solace in books of plays and poetry even though they make him cry.
Elijah has a hard time connecting with his daughter Anka (Kathryn Schwartz) who spends almost all of her time conversing with a VR simulation of her presumed dead husband (who may have been a revolutionary of some kind, again Hedrick doles out tantalizing backstory without quite spelling anything out) clearly more emotionally invested in that virtual relationship than in her real one with the lumbering Carl (another great tragicomic performance by recent Jeff winner Mark Pracht). Anka’s teenage children Sophia (Ariana Lopez) and Nicolas (Benjamin Zarbock) also live mostly in their simulated trances.
Elijah longs for real, human connections and attempts to revive the dead art of theatre, asking his family to participate in a production of Uncle Vanya. 
“They don’t know what a play is!” Elijah’s irascible, alcoholic, perpetually entertaining mother in law Gayle (Artistic Director Kathy Scambiattera in a show stealing turn) correctly scoffs.

However, Elijah persists and gradually begins to teach these sweet children of the future what it once meant to embody dreams rather than retreat inside them.
This is not merely a play about a play but a play about directing. Elijah is a director who desperately wants to communicate a vision, and to share why it moves him.
Kayla Adams, the director of this show, and her cast and crew capture the atmosphere of this world well. It’s a long show, nearly two and a half hours but not a single moment feels slow or unnecessary, a credit to Adams’ pacing and it navigates the challenge of the mixed tones well.
This is the first professional production of this play. I hope that it’s not the last. 
I have loved it for three years now. 
Take this dive.

The Artistic Home 1376 W. Grand Avenue Chicago, IL 60642

Runs Thursdays through Sundays Sep 11 – Oct 27, 2019