I am, I guess, middle-aged, which is a bit hard to define when you’re queer and single, or in the absence of the milestones that are supposed to mark this time of my life. I feel pretty good about getting older, but I do sometimes have middle-aged thoughts: Have I done the right things with my life? How likely are the things I still want to do? Am I as happy as I could be; am I less happy than I was in the past? Will I be happy in the future, a question both about whether the future will have happiness-creating circumstances and if I have the appropriate capacity for happiness left inside me.
It’s hard to feel hopeful about the future these days, even though I’m far from giving in to despair. At the protests I’ve been to in recent weeks, the idea of “trans joy” often gets brought up as vital, without much defining of what “joy” is. Is “joy” now something different than it was before 2016, or 2020, or 2024? Is it waking up every day proudly trans despite a government that wants me dead? Is it that I can write the things I want despite a crumbling industry? Have “simple” things like this become radical acts, and is that a meaningful life lesson about gratitude and change and satisfaction? Or is it a sign of how shortened our horizons are becoming, that “still trans” and “not being humiliated by private equity goons” are now major achievements? Are things going to be this bad, or worse, forever?
One good thing about being middle-aged is that I’m regularly reminded that I’m not the first person to have any thought or feeling, even if it’s my first time having it. I was reminded of this last night while watching Vanya, a one-man adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya by Simon Stephens and starring Andrew Scott of Sherlock and Ripley fame. After running in London, the play is coming to New York in March; I was excited about this until I learned that tickets cost over $300. But for a much more reasonable $12 I could watch the show through the National Theatre’s subscription program, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while but which the absurd price of the in-person tickets finally got me to bite the bullet on.
Uncle Vanya is about a group of people obsessed with age and happiness and whether life has passed them by and why. Vanya sticks to the plot of Chekhov’s 1897 play, though it modernizes the language and anglicizes the names. The play takes place on a country estate that once belonged to titular character Ivan’s sister Anna, who died. Now, Ivan and his niece Sonya care for the estate to support Anna’s elderly widower Alexander, here a washed-up filmmaker, who has married a much younger second wife, Helena. Ivan is attracted to Helena, as is the country doctor Michael, whom Sonya has long had a crush on. Things come to a head when Alexander declares that he wants to sell the estate and live off the proceeds, threatening to upend the miserable routines everyone’s been trapped in since Anna’s death.
Everyone in Vanya loves each other, and hates each other, and longs for change, and will do anything to keep staying stuck. Everyone is so anxious about their own happiness and curious about the happiness of others, but only insofar as how that possible happiness might reflect on their own happiness or lack thereof. Frustrated ambition is everywhere: Ivan worships Alexander’s films, despite the fact that he hasn’t made any in nearly two decades, and he also blames Alexander’s success for his own miserly life, feeling like he could have been great if only he hadn’t had to spend his life tending to the estate. Sonya has never told Michael her true feelings; when she makes the overture of a confession, Michael can barely tell what she’s talking about. Michael himself waxes lyrical about his hobby of planting trees to stave off the environmental degradation of the countryside, but the only version of him we see is one who drinks too much and constantly threatens to leave but never seems to. Everyone picks constantly at what it means to be happy, or to be talented, or to be interesting or fulfilled or old or young or pretty or plain, needing someone else to be or not be those things to justify why they are or aren’t those things. Everyone is tremendously complicated, but also so painfully simple, so earnestly full of longing for the love and fulfillment that they think they deserve but can’t have.
But “everyone” here is just Andrew Scott, who plays all the characters. It’s frankly astonishing to watch him: for a play that feels so deeply concerned with decrepitude and aging, he is inspiringly vital and alive in the roles. It’s never hard to tell who’s talking; characters are sometimes differentiated by a prop like a tennis ball or sunglasses, by playing with a necklace or twisting a dish towel, but they’re just as often portrayed by the slightest change of voice or widening of the eyes. (As jealous as I am of anyone who can afford to see the show live, the filmed version is able to focus on these subtle gestures and facial expressions in a way that would be lost in a theater.) It’s incredible that it’s never goofy to watch Scott have a conversation or fight with himself; at several points he portrays one character holding another back, or sharing an illicit kiss, and it somehow works perfectly even though it absolutely shouldn’t.
I was intrigued by the idea of the show, but I never quite got why it had to be a one-person cast. Especially with a major star at the helm, it could easily be a vanity project, or the kind of twist a revival shoehorns in to justify itself. But here, the solo cast amplifies the way Vanya’s characters are both obsessed with and ignorant of each other’s internal lives, how it feels like they’re fighting over the world’s limited amount of happiness like a game of capture the flag. You could read it, maybe, as a metaphor for our country these days, one body being torn apart by competing desires, the arm blaming the leg for why it can’t reach what it wants. You could see it, as I did in this viewing, as a symbol of how hard it is to follow our desires when we can want so many things, of not becoming bitter over our own choices, of seeing all our possibilities. Real circumstances do conspire against the play’s characters–the nature of peasant life in Chekhov’s Russia, poverty and tragedy–but they have more agency than they think, if only they’d get out of their own ways.
After Alexander brings up the idea of selling the estate, Ivan tries to shoot him; to his own amazement, he misses, twice. It’s a great bit of theatrical structure that this isn’t the end of the play; there’s another act, where everyone decides to pretend nothing happened, and Alexander and Helena go back to the city, and Ivan and Sonya get back to their work on the estate. Things could, and should, have changed, but nothing does. Near the end, Vanya gives a monologue:
Could you imagine if it was possible to completely change the way you live your life? To look at your life and ask yourself what you would do if it had ended? Your old life, it’s over. And then take what’s left of your real life and live it properly. How do I do that? Where do I start?
Through Scott as all the characters, asking himself this question, it’s a sad one–if caring for the estate has held him back all these years, he could have let Alexander sell it–but it’s also a reminder that it is possible, at any time, to overcome at least some of the barriers we put in our own ways. I can grudgingly get why Vanya is worth all that money to see, but it was a delight to get to see it for much less due to innovations in arts access that came out of covid and somehow still persist. (My list of other plays to watch with my subscription is now very long.) These days, I’ll take my joys where I can get them.
