Review: The Real Ivanov Is a Real Snooze

The Real Ivanov, Laura Strausfeld’s slimmed-down adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 1887 play, bills itself as “a comedy about despair.” If only it was occasionally funny, it might have mitigated the despair I felt by the curtain call.

It stars Sam Underwood (from the remake of Dynasty) as Nikolai Ivanov, a provincial Russian landowner stuck in the middle. He’s not titled like his uncle, Count Shabyelsky (Jordan Lage, giving sassy Jeff Bezos, fallen on hard times). Nor is he fabulously wealthy like the widow Marfusha Babakina (Kimberlee Walker). And while he’s richer than his property manager Borkin (Sam Adegoke, the life of a dull party), he cannot fulfill the estate’s needs in a timely manner because he is deeply in debt to his neighbor Lebedev (Spencer Aste, a bearded bundle of jittery nerves) and his snobby wife, Zinaida (Sarah Long).

Five years into his marriage to Anna (Ivory Aquino), he’s clearly no longer in love, if he ever was. Zinaida gossips that he was only ever interested in her family money, but after Anna converted to Christianity, her rich Jewish parents cut her off. Now she’s dying, and Dr. Lvov (Hagan Oliveras, as wooden as a tongue depressor) blames Nikolai’s behavior. It certainly doesn’t help when Anna catches her husband canoodling with Lebedev’s daughter Sasha (Amelia Mason). Once young and idealistic (but now 35 and bitter) Nikolai is hopelessly trapped in a life he no longer wants.

This is a play that should speak directly to me. Having recently turned 40, I have become uncomfortably aware of the doors now closed to me as I contemplate the consequences of my choices—like the decision to attend drama school, for which I am still thousands of dollars in debt. Ivanov, a middle-aged man awash in debt and regret, feels like a painfully familiar figure.

And yet I had trouble connecting with Underwood’s guarded melancholy, which he wears like armor throughout. Surrounded by much more memorable performances, he tends to fade into the background, a supporting character in his own play (Underwood is producing the show through his company Initiative Productions). Perhaps that is the real tragedy of Ivanov, but it makes for dismal viewing.

The same could be said of Strausfeld’s script, which is not so much an adaptation as a heavy shearing of the text. An independent Chekhov scholar who organizes annual birthday celebrations of the playwright, she has mercifully trimmed the four-act play to 100 minutes, but seems to have cut out much of the emotional core of the story in the process. Somehow, it feels longer than the 2 hour, 30-minute production the New American Ensemble mounted in March.

Strausfeld’s economical yet bland staging is partially to blame. She has conspired with set and lighting designer Jiyoun Chang to limit the actors to a very constricted playing space—no chairs and no escape. The concept reaches its farcical zenith in the fourth act, with the entire cast shouting at one another on a red runner carpet within a small rectangular box of light. It’s a striking visualization of the dead end in which Nikolai has found himself—but again, the image is more satisfying intellectually than emotionally. And good luck keeping this cavalcade of characters straight if you’re not already familiar with the play.

The other production elements are serviceable: Elia Matza costumes the actors in generic Chekhovian summer tan, with only a few remarkable flourishes (she gives Walker a collar of black feathers, as if she is ready to star in a one-woman version of Swan Lake). Brandon Bulls’s sound design shows up between scenes, but rarely makes itself known otherwise. I wish it had, if only to break up the tedium.

Is this the real Ivanov, as the title so grandly claims? Perhaps, but those of us in the squeezed middle of American society don’t need to pay the price of an off-Broadway ticket to feel this noxious combination of ennui and despair. We live it.