THE ICY GENIUS OF UNCLE VANYA

"Writing plays is wrong," Anton Chekhov declared in 1895. He was in a position to know. The premiere of "The Seagull" had just been greeted with boos and guffaws. That was his reward for having the courage to return to the stage after the failure six years earlier of his first run at "Uncle Vanya," a failure that prompted a producer's advice to stick to writing short stories.

Chekhov not only stuck to play writing, he stuck to "Vanya," which became a hit 10 years after the critical failure of the first version. Not with everyone, of course. "Where is the drama? What does it consist in? It doesn't go anywhere!" Leo Tolstoy complained. Thus have complained many, yet Chekhov, and especially "Uncle Vanya," are still with us.

Based solely, and perhaps erroneously, on my own experience and reading, I'd say that in recent years "Uncle Vanya" has been the most-produced Chekhov play, with "The Three Sisters" running a close second. We've seen two productions of "Vanya" in Washington just this autumn: David Mamet's adaptation at the Round House, directed by Nick Olcott, and Carol Rocamora's translation at Arena, directed by Zelda Fichandler. And just a couple of seasons ago, there was a production at Washington Shakespeare Company.

"Vanya" was the text Andre Gregory chose to spend two years rehearsing and exploring; Louis Malle filmed a rehearsal and the result was released in 1994 as "Vanya on 42nd Street." And 35 years after he performed the role, Laurence Olivier is still remembered for his performance as Astrov -- the family friend who dashes Sonya's hopes for a proposal -- opposite the Vanya of Michael Redgrave. (People who saw him testify -- with defensive wonder, knowing it sounds mundane -- that they will never forget the way that Olivier's Astrov buttoned up his jacket as he prepared to leave the Voynitsky household for the last time.)

There are practical reasons for "Vanya's" popularity. It has a relatively small cast -- nine compared with 15-plus for "The Cherry Orchard" and 14 for "Three Sisters" -- and so is less expensive to put on. Of the nine roles, four are among the best in all drama, and those four are divided neatly into two male parts (Vanya and Astrov) and two female (Yelena and Sonya.) So the play fits modern production needs well.

And it can be argued that "Vanya" is the most familiar of Chekhov's plays. The characters in both "The Seagull" and "The Cherry Orchard" are somewhat rarefied and hysterical. But anyone who has a family recognizes the emotional reality in "Uncle Vanya."

There's Vanya himself, who has belatedly realized that he has wasted his life helping to support a man he thought was a genius and has now discovered to be merely a windbag, a boorish bully smugly content with himself. This character, Professor Serebryakov, is the widower of Vanya's dead sister and the favorite of Vanya's mother, who tends to dismiss and quarrel with her son. (Chekhov took this from his own life, and it's proof of his objectivity -- for he himself was the favorite child, and it was his siblings he saw slighted.) The most virtuous and deserving character, the professor's daughter Sonya, is the one most taken advantage of.

The Voynitsky family isn't "dysfunctional." Theirs are the slights and unfairnesses of everyday bourgeois life, of the lives of most playgoers -- the sorts of issues that may cause scenes at the Christmas dinner table but never result in anything as horrible and grand as murder. When Vanya takes after Serebryakov with a pistol, he's perfectly justified, but he's also ridiculous. The cool gaze of the playwright carries a message to all his characters: "Get over it."

Chekhov's coolness, his renunciation of histrionics, is a quality that makes an audience feel they know his world. Emotional intensity is thrilling onstage and is often employed on the level of genius -- Shakespeare being the obvious example -- but we recognize it as a style, a form of expressionism rather than an attempt to copy life. (As Alec Guinness once remarked about the typical Shakespearean set, "I've had very few important conversations on the steps of my house.")

Despite all the early discouraging comments about its not being theatrical enough, Chekhov's writing for the stage retreated further and further from the dramatic conventions. He didn't follow the advice to write only stories (though he continued to write dozens of them, almost every one a masterpiece), he simply started to write his plays more like he wrote his stories. He tried to have the "dramatic" incidents occur offstage, and show the audience the characters' reactions to them. He put in front of the audience all the stuff that had previously been presumed to take place in the wings and during intermission. (Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, hovering on the edge of the violent action of "Hamlet," owe as much to Chekhov as to Beckett.)

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This harks back to Greek drama, of course, but Chekhov was no tragedian. "I have no passion," he commented more than once. His was a comic temperament rather than a tragic one, and it's often been noted that, as in Dante's Hell, comedy's heart is of ice. "You are colder than the devil with people," Gorky wrote him about "Vanya. "You are as indifferent to them as snow, a blizzard."

Critics and theater people alike talk about Chekhov's "compassion," but it's always seemed to me that they were confusing compassion with even-handedness. Chekhov is not judgmental, but that's hardly the same as being merciful. If we in the audience tend to think of him as "one of us," it's because he viewed himself with as much detachment as he did everyone else. How could he not? Ill most of his short life with tuberculosis, he was a physician who could not heal himself. It was a situation whose irony he appreciated.

Chekhov subjected himself more directly to his own clinical gaze in "Uncle Vanya" than in any other play. True, he had put autobiographical words into the mouth of the caddish novelist Trigorin in "The Seagull": "As soon as {my work} is published I hate it. I realize it's not what I had in mind, it's all wrong, I never should have written it, and I get all depressed and disgusted with myself. And then the public reads it and says . . . Charming, but a far cry from Tolstoy' . . . Charming and clever, clever and charming' till the day I die."

But this -- the word is unavoidable -- charming self-satire is a far cry from the lacerating portrait of the burned-out Astrov in "Vanya." Like Chekhov, Astrov is a doctor, and like Chekhov he ministers to the local peasantry. "The third week of Lent I went to Malitskoe on account of the epidemic . . . Spotted typhus . . . In the huts, the villagers were stretched out every which way . . . Mud and grime, reeking smells, smoke, even calves on the floor alongside the sick people . . . Little pigs on the spot too."

This could almost be a paraphrase of a letter Chekhov wrote to a friend while working to prevent an outbreak of cholera in his part of the country. "My soul is weary," he complained, sounding like many of his characters. "I'm bored. Not being your own master, thinking only of diarrhea . . . riding abominable horses over uncharted roads, and reading only about cholera, waiting only for cholera, and yet feeling perfect indifference to the disease and the people you're serving -- believe me, these are cooks that could spoil any broth."

Astrov is worn down by his ceaseless work, and Chekhov complained that he felt his medical service took away precious time from his writing -- and he knew the time he had was limited (he died at 44). Yet he continued to work prodigiously, writing stories, plays and muckraking journalism, treating peasants for free at his home, founding schools, establishing treatment facilities for the poor. So far as I know, there is no major theater in Russia named after Chekhov. But there is a sanitarium.

Obviously Astrov is nothing so simple as a self-portrait or a mouthpiece. He's more like an embodiment of the playwright's worst fears about himself. Dreamer and pragmatist, attractive to women but skittish of love, saving forests while drinking himself to death, Astrov is arguably Chekhov's most complex and penetrating creation. We don't have to know anything about Chekhov's life to sense something special here; the quality of the characterization tells us that the writer is particularly present.

And it is to Astrov that Chekhov gives his most poignant and perhaps his most famous question about audiences and posterity:

"Will those people who live after us, in the course of a hundred or two hundred years . . . will they remember and speak kindly of us?"

The answer is on stages everywhere. CAPTION: Tom Hewitt and Melissa King at Arena; Marty Lodge, Jerry Whiddon and Bill Largess at Round House; and Laurence Olivier at Old Vic.

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