Interview: How Marianna Gailus Became the One-Woman Understudy for Andrew Scott's One-Man Vanya

Marianna Gailus didn’t see this coming.

She found it hard to imagine that Andrew Scott would require an understudy for his one-man, eight-character Vanya, let alone that the creative team would be looking to cast a woman nearly 20 years Scott’s junior.

But Gailus, who made her Broadway debut last season in Patriots, got the job, and has now played the role in a couple of pre-scheduled performances. She follows in the footsteps of Victoria Blunt, who understudied in the 2023 London production of this tour-de-force, which is cocreated by Scott, director Sam Yates, playwright Simon Stephens, and designer Rosanna Vize.

Gailus and Blunt have been in touch: “We’re the only two people who understand how insane this job is,” Gailus told TheaterMania.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

So, full disclosure, we’ve been friends for about 12 years. We sang in choir together in college and we once co-emceed a cabaret on the island of Rhodes.
We did — oh, my God.

And a couple months ago, I was talking to a mutual friend of ours who said, “Did you hear about Marianna’s new gig?” How did Vanya come into your life?
I knew that Vanya was coming into New York but had no idea that the job existed until a self-tape request came through and I thought, “Oh, okay, yeah, sure, totally!,” of course, thinking I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually getting the job. I had an in-person callback in January and that same day found out that I had got the job.

Vanya was built for Andrew. How does it work for another actor to play the role?
Yes, it’s built on the body and the spirit and the voice of Andrew. So many Andrew-isms have ended up in the script. And yet, something that the creative team has said repeatedly is how really anybody can step into it. It is so wholly his in a way that it freed me up to feel it could be wholly mine. I found myself less and less married to all of Andrew’s choices. His imagination is unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed. The distance between what’s on the page and what you see him do is vast and wondrous. I’m so lucky because I get to pick and choose from all of his ideas and see what lands in my own body and voice in an organic way.

Tell me about that process.
I got to work backwards. I had the broad strokes of everything that he had done. And then I got to find, “oh, in my body, that just doesn’t really make as much sense.” On a purely technical level, for example, pitch. My body gives me a different range of pitches than Andrew’s body gives him. Where he might pitch something up really high, for me, it comes out sounding kind of  cartoonish. So, maybe instead of pitch I can focus on placement. What happens if place it a little further forward in the mouth? If I do that, what happens to the facial muscles, what happens to the tension there? How does that inform age and experience?

Maureen [the servant], for example, Andrew’s sort of living in a high and light and floaty land with her. In my body, she became a little more wizened. It’s a little bit lower, she’s a little more tired. She’s got heavier bones for me. Once certain characters fall into place, you realize how to place everyone around them.

How you think gender plays when you take on the role? Does it shift the audience’s attention to certain characters?
People have said pretty consistently, in the scenes with the two women onstage, they do feel the temperature changes a bit. For reasons obvious and not so obvious, I’m able to step into those women with a little more confidence and clarity.

Something I think is so moving about Andrew’s Sonya is we’re watching this man in his late 40s really caring for this younger woman. There’s something about the distance between those two that really adds to her journey. Because I’m closer to Sonya in terms of identity, I was worried that she would be somehow less moving, which is such a silly thing to feel.

In a funny way, it didn’t really occur to me how the opposite would happen with the male characters. When I take the stage as Ivan or Michael, it gives the audience another opportunity to really think about those characters’ motivations because of the distance between me and them. They become more legible in a certain way.

I would have killed to do Sonya or Helena in any traditionally cast productions so the fact that I get to do both with accents…what a dream.

How do you approach trying to create the effect of keeping the audience aware of where everyone is onstage when we can only see one body at a time?
There’s the staging, the choreography of props, and making sure that, physically, you maybe leave a character in a resting position so you can come back to that position when you pick that character up again. That’s a vocabulary we talked a lot about. It also relieves the performer of the burden of constantly having to focus their attention on the empty space, because then you start to feel really trapped. If you’re confident enough that you’ve left them in the place where they need to be, you’ll be able to pick them up again.

Your first performance was April 23.  What do you feel like you learned with an audience?
I learned how in control of the whole environment I am. The tennis ball, one of the props that represents one of the characters, fell off the chair in the very beginning. I was able to pick it up as another character, it was totally fine. Things will go awry and there are so many solutions.

The runs that I’ve had in front of people tend to be a lot faster. I have a much better sense of how the adrenaline kicks in. Because people are listening, you’re forced to be less self-indulgent. You have to move on, they want to know what’s coming next. You can’t just sit in a moment because it feels delicious.

Tell me about meeting Andrew and any advice he gave you.
We met during tech week. On a break, he took the time to scurry up to the balcony where I was sitting and gave me a big hug and sat down and asked me about memorization, because he was relearning it. He offered, if I ever had any doubts about my dialect work, that he would be a very happy resource. And gave me a big, big hug the night before I went on and wished me all the best. It was very sweet.