The Timely Review - Uncle Vanya
This play is about people. Their ways and yearnings, disappointments and frustrations, angers and resignations. It's written right at the beginning of the modern age, and as I can only barely tell my Chekhov from my Shakespeare, I trust that the rich renderings of the human experience are some combination of the playwright, Anton Chekhov, writing in Russian in 1897, and Nate Burger, the adapter, writing in English in 2026, roughly 130 years apart. It was fresh and lively, felt true to old while being new.
The set was a particular mix of wealthy and simple. It stays true to the imagined time of 130 years ago on a rural farm estate, somewhere in the hinterlands of Russia, Spring-Green-on-Don. A lower level of material intensity - wooden furniture in a wooden house, several books, an ornate teapot or two. No gleaming palace, but the life of the landed gentry, those who own the estates.
We are in pre-revolutionary Russia here, with serfs in the background and the landed gentry upon the stage - “if only the Tsar knew!”
The actors play their recognizably human roles well, desirable and plain, yearned for and yearning, resigned and hopeful.
So if you're a human, there's a lot to like. But if you're a tree, there's even more.
One of the characters, Casey Hoekstra’s Doctor, has a passion for the trees and their planting, for patient observation, and benevolent intention. He might call himself an environmentalist, though I don't know if the word had been coined in 1897, though clearly it was sitting there the whole time, implied by the structure of the English language, its partial origins in Latin, and the endless possibilities of the suffix.
There's something seductive about this Doctor. To our modern sensibilities, it’s surprising that a character, written and living in the 1890s, would so stridently agree with us pessimistic moderns. I imagine many in the audience nodding in righteous agreement as Casey rants and raves, that we humans will cut down all the forests of the land, dry up the rivers, pave over God's green earth in inky black. You're right, we might say. We humans are like locusts upon the earth. Surely, were we to give the Earth a chance to speak, it would condemn us, call us evil, wish that we never were. Ah, I can imagine this audience saying, so true, so prescient. It truly is the same today.
But doesn't that have its own tell? This play was not written now. It was written then, 130 years ago. Might the doctor have expected that by the end of his lifetime, all the forests could be chopped down? Or perhaps at the end of his children's lifetimes, or their children’s? Yet here we are, 130 years later, and apparently still on the precipice.
I don't dispute that we have paved over paradise, to put up, among other things, parking lots, homes, productive capacities, palaces of entertainment, monuments to our selves. I don't dispute that old forest gets cut down anew every day, and that the monoculture grids of a wood farm are a poor substitute for the complex real thing.
But the last century and more has seen the better angels of our nature prevail, with public ownership and preservation of lands now common. We have constrained ourselves on how roughshod we allow ourselves to run over the earth. We have reduced the material intensity required to create an ever more abundant standard of living through ingenuity, scientific curiosity, and the neurotic glee with which the market reduces cost and waste.
I think about the characters we don't see in this play, though they are obliquely mentioned, and in fact support the world around the play: the peasants, the serfs. 130 years ago, they lived in a hut, one room for an entire family, and perhaps its defecating animals, too. Before all that pavement that was to come, the road was full of mud, pounded to structurelessness by every foot and wheel and hoof. Best not to go anywhere after a rain - but this is subsistence living. You simply can't not.
Yes, the forests are being cut down, but can you begrudge these people for wanting wood to build a larger home? Wouldn’t you want it for yourself? Would you want it for your children?
1890 was a time when the material intensity of a human life began to grow, and the materials to hand were wood and stone, raw things of nature. And if there was cheap wood available? Well, a lot of peasants would want a second room to their house, or a floor, or to build a structure for the animals. The hungry maw of human desire greedily spoke to itself through the market - yes, more wood, and nails, steel and stone, polished glass and dim, dim candlelight.
But you'll notice that we haven't cut down all the forests, despite the population ballooning tenfold in the intervening time, our standards of living rising tenfold as well. Nowhere even close. In part, we planted a lot of trees, very slow growing corn, a pine that will take some decades to create enough wood within itself to make some standard boards, to be cut and replanted once more. We did not have to cut down every last tree from the Old World. In fact, it's cheaper and easier to grow them ourselves, if we have the time, as we do.
And the composition of our material lives has changed dramatically, as well. How much of what you consume in a year is wood? The materials of our lives have diversified, metal and glass, plastic, and rubber. Tenfold the population, tenfold the standard of living, one hundred fold the material intensity, and the old forests yet stand.
I would think the doctor would be surprised to know that vast tracts were never logged, and though we paved over more of paradise than was paved in his day, we have only paved so much. We ease back, with our conscience. We make us clean up after ourselves. Not always and everywhere, but by no means never and nowhere, as was the case in his day. I think the doctor would be delighted, relieved, at the state of the world in 2026.
So why do we nod in agreement? Why do we believe that we believe what he believed, when he would not be able to believe the world in which we be. The doctor feared that the world was on track to be denuded by humanity. We stand here, with protected land, self imposed constraints, and a billion ingenuous minds thinking up new ways to be and do. And yet we say to him, yes, it really is terrible.
The resonance of his language and of his point of view, should give us pause. It's so easy to be negative, so easy to be angry, so easy to see the thousand and one things that happen every day that offend your values.
Perhaps a math lesson is in order, the briefest possible introduction to calculus.
Consider a graph of a line. When the line is high, the Earth is doing well. When the line is low, the Earth is doing badly. Time stretches off to the right. In the doctor's time, let's say the Earth was doing well, but getting worse. The line is lower than it was yesterday. The doctor laments.
The first derivative of this line - the first additional piece of information that can be derived from this line - is the rate of change. Moment to moment, is the Earth doing better, the same, or worse? Is the rate of change in goodness positive, neutral, or negative? If the Earth is doing worse as time moves forward, that is cause for concern.
A century passes, the line continues to go down. We here today see an Earth that is worse than when the doctor lived (if you consider us not part of the Earth, for the moment). We see that it is still getting worse, and we despair. We believe that we see the same reality that the doctor saw.
The existence of a first derivative implies the existence of a second derivative, the second piece of information that can be derived from a line on a graph. This is the rate of change of the rate of change. Yes, today is worse than yesterday, another tree was chopped down. But is it, perhaps, only a little bit worse than yesterday? Whereas a century ago, yesteryear’s today might have been quite a bit worse than its yesterday? I posit it is, and that this is cause for hope, for satisfaction, even. We should not rest on our laurels, but we should keep it up.
At the rate things were going in 1890, it might have felt like this would all be over rather quickly. Today, it seems to me that the end is a far way off, before we cut down every last tree, make extinct every species that does not serve us. In fact, I don't think we'll ever get there.
The rate of change is lessening. And if trends hold - a dangerous business, but mind you, the doctor's pessimism is based on it too - things may even turn positive in the future. The Earth will get better. It may still be worse than it was before - it takes a long time for things to grow, it takes a long time for a change in the rate of change to add up to anything meaningful. But turn, it will.
The booming population of the Earth is just about to crest. Living standards continue to rise, but also digitize and plasticize. Our conscience around the natural world continues to grow. I'm not saying it's perfect. Another acre of Amazon rainforest will be cut down tomorrow to make way for a little more beef - but we won't cut it all down. Not even close. Yes, species will go extinct, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, at the lightly elevated rate that we have caused. But most won’t, and speciation will continue, the continual jumble of extancy that has always been the truth.
It is a tragedy worthy of sorrow, but not of despair. We can lament the fact of our footfalls, without having to believe that we will stomp out all life on Earth. Our population will decline, our ingenuity will decrease our reliance on the scarce things of Earth, and our conscience will grow.
The second derivative turns the first. Before you know it, the earth is getting better. You likely won't live to see it, of course - the doctor didn't. But our children's children may.
Did I mention that there was a mirror on the stage wall? If I leaned slightly, I could see myself in it. How fitting.
As usual, four performances to highlight, two by two:
Marcus Truschinksi: Ah, the handsomest man in Spring Green. Marcus plays Uncle Vanya, sporting a big graying beard and exuding the threatening boredom of a despairing drunk. I like it when Marcus gets to be unlikeable. I think I caught his eye from the Best Seats in the House, and caused him to stumble for a moment - apologies, dear friend.
Maggie Cramer: It breaks my heart to see Maggie’s heart broken, a young woman consigned to a life of tending the rural estate, so few possibilities, with the gleaming hope of the Doctor’s love sustaining her - and then it is all dashed. She well portrays the changing nature of her inner turmoil.
Casey Hoekstra: The passion! The intensity! Above problematicizing notwithstanding, his joy and spirit are enthralling. And some fine singing and dancing, to boot - come to the barn!
Karen Janes Woditsch: Perhaps the most sympathetic character on stage, alongside David Daniels’ Waffles. The servant, old and breaking, but still forced to shuffle around tending to the needs and whims of the masters of the house. She is an intelligent observer who is unable to state her observations outside of banter, due to her social role, but reveals it in a singular glance.
So go and see Uncle Vanya at APT this summer, think of the trees, and see if you, too, can find some optimism within yourself.
Plant an Idea,
Twin Crix
