What does it mean to plant a tree? In Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, it means being called an idealist and a crank. Astrov has dedicated his adult life to the practice of medicine but everybody knows that his real passion is saving Russia's forests. He plants birch trees, imagining how they will benefit humanity in a thousand years. He takes pride in preventing future epidemics through a healthy environment and more breathable air. It's a thankless enterprise; in pre-Bolshevik Russia, people derided such passion and vision as eccentric. (How little things change!)

Uncle Vanya is a play about investment. The title character devotes half of his life to Professor Alexander Serebryakov: Vanya[...]