Let's start this project of only writing about good things by noting that the pandemic was the single worst time for the performing arts in hundreds of years. No artist could make a living and for most of it, 2/3rds of artists were outright unemployed. It was a literal superdepression. Artists are a societal seizmograph, when you look at the history of art, again and again you see a harbinger of things to come for the world writ large. If 2/3rds of artists can be unemployed, so can you.
But one of the glorious bright spots of the pandemic (...) was that the overachieving artists who still can find work broadcasted their results over the internet for us all to see. Whether your taste is Neil Young or the Berlin Philharmonic, there they were for us in our time of greatest need, freely broadcasting food for the morale we need to slog through day after day. We felt less alone, less abandoned, less at the mercy of tragedy. Life had consolations again.
I don't know what it is about live performance that's so different from recording, but it's always preferable. We need community culture, we need to know that we experience the same entertainment with other people in the same place as at the same time, and we need to know that other people love what we love too. We need to know other people experience what we experience, and if we don't, we desperately seek them out and are willing to barter everything to get rid of that loneliness in incredibly counterproductive ways. We write off half the world as evil and we break friendships whose absence just makes us lonelier.
It's gotten harder and harder for Americans to get that community experience. First went music halls and vaudeville around the Great Depression, then went weekly attendance at movies around 1970, and now everything is a TV satellite or a streaming service. At best, the only way we know we're in a community is that everybody comments on the reviews and recaps on the internet. But 'recap culture' is yet another way we're all divided, as the internet gives us the means to attack each other's disagreements and assign character disparagement to our interlocutors.
There are much better ways to communicate with strangers than talking to them. When we see things together, we can take on faith that other people feel as we feel, and even if we have no proof of it, we go home feeling less lonely.
Like family, politics, medicine, and science, the internet is the solution to the problems it causes. It can make us all feel so terribly lonely, it's also the nearest thing to real life interaction and gets ever closer to the real thing. As chaos outside our homes gets ever more volatile, the internet will be more and more how we build communities - chaos largely caused by the internet.
In an era when community interaction is impossible without risking death itself, the internet is the only way to feel part of a greater community and experience something other than your own responsibilities. And that's why these performances were so magnificent. It's not a live experience, but it's the nearest thing to life and a lifeline to community; a statement of defiance that we can still go on, what we love will not disappear, and joy need not be put on hold.
There haven't been performances quite like this since World War II, when a bomb could drop and everybody in the theater would die together. The very danger of them makes them more exciting. It makes the performers search for more. It makes the audience more attentive. It makes everybody realize the urgency of that ecstatic truth you can only get from an artistic experience. It speaks to us and we see ourselves in the characters and moods as we've never seen ourselves before. The theater watches us, the music plays us, the movies film us.
And is there any work of art in the world more appropriate for life during a pandemic than Uncle Vanya?
Uncle Vanya is, for me, the greatest play ever written. it's not an objective statement, it's just a declaration of desperate love for a play with so much compassion that it floats to us from the proscenium in a state of grace. People say that Chekhov is depressing and gloomy, but even if you cry, and you will, how can something so empathetic and forgiving ever end with you emerging on anything but wings?
This, in 2020, is now the best production of the best play I've ever seen. The performance isn't perfect, nothing is, not even Chekhov, but even if some of the jokes can't possibly land in a performance without a live audience, translations and acting styles are so much better for Chekhov than they used to be. Chekhov is such the opposite of stuffy that no playwright could suffer more from the proper English and stilted elocution of Olivier or Anthony Hopkins. People used to play Chekhov's characters as though they were little different than Shakespearean kings, but English actors finally play his characters as though they're human beings.
Toby Jones (Claudius Templesmith in the Hunger Games) gives one of the greatest performances I've ever seen as Vanya. You feel every inch of his malice, his laziness, his capacity for self-destruction, and Jones makes you understand that beneath it all is a sensitive human who deserves our compassion even with all his baggage or perhaps because of it. The rest of the cast is with him every step of the way.
What is Uncle Vanya about? It's about people doing nothing at all. It's about aimless people who know they should have purpose and meaning, and know how easily they could find it, yet can't bring themselves to take even the first step. It has so much compassion for people who are suffering, but it never lets them off the hook either. It's about unrequited love, pride and humiliation, scapegoating and responsibility, faithfulness and infidelity, the intermingling of lust and contempt. It's ultimately about a community and how they grow and shrink together, and how the very people we're most bonded to are the ones with the most power to hurt and heal each other.
Uncle Vanya is not a perfect play, no play is. It takes an act and a half to truly get into gear - really a full hour. But as is the play itself's message, there are untold rewards in being bored. So long as you're eventually riveted, boredom is always to a purpose. The purpose here is to make us feel the languor, the anxiety, the suffering. We have to feel everything these characters feel, and we have to feel in our guts why they explode the way they do.
Chekhov has an exceedingly rare ability that you only find in the very greatest artists. Every line of his writing can simultaneously express every human emotion of which you can think - sadness, joy, humor, disgust, apathy, wonder, despair, hope, pity, contempt - at the exact same time. Not even Shakespeare can do that. The fights in Chekhov aren’t really fights, because people bicker over things for which there is no reason to bicker. Character to fly into rage for no reason at all, every line can call up decades-long resentments, words and actions ensue that everybody regrets. But then everybody makes their peace, and life continues just as it did before, until the next argument.
This is how life unfolds for 99.999% of the human race. We're not the masters of our destinies and life steers us far more often than we steer life. Life unfolds in an accidental way for which we cannot possibly plan and it hurts us all very deeply when our plans come to so little. Like us all, each of these characters knows too many disappointments, lots of boredom, and joy much too occasionally. But come what may for each, life goes on. We're still here, and that's the ultimate cause to celebrate.
Chekhov called Uncle Vanya a comedy, which may be the joke itself. It’s not a comedy in the modern sense since there aren’t all that many laughs (though there are some). And it’s not a comedy in any antiquated sense either since things don’t end particularly happily. Lots of issues are raised, gales of turbulence ensue, but nothing changes. He also entitled the play Uncle Vanya in spite of the fact that Uncle Vanya is not the main character. Like so many of the greatest narratives, there is no main character. There is only a community - listening to and ignoring each other, their moral aims growing noble and shrinking into small-mindedness from moment to moment, but always together, always impacting each other, and always themselves. The reason it's called Uncle Vanya is because he's the uncle of Sonya, the play's moral center, who lives a life just as ignoble and degrading as her uncle's - full of unrequited love, pointless work and pointless poverty, a monotonous life of low expectations. But unlike Vanya, she does not give up hope, and at the end of the play, she gives the speech to her uncle which is the most moving passage in any work of art I've ever experienced:
"What can we do? We have to live. We have days and days ahead of us. Endless evenings and we'll bare it all with good grace. We'll do our work, and we'll support everyone who relies on us, and we'll continue to do it until we're old, and we'll accept our dying and we'll say, yes we suffered, yes there were times when we wept and times we could hardly keep going, and God will smile on us. And you and I will see, Uncle Vanya, we'll see that life is radiant and beautiful and dignified, and we'll look back on those unhappy moments and we'll feel nothing but compassion and we'll smile - and we'll take our rest. I believe that Vanya, I do! We'll hear the angels. The sky will be full of diamonds and we'll see all the evil in the world, and the suffering and the pain, all engulfed by the mercy that's going to fill up the whole world. And our lives will be as sweet and gentle as a caress. I believe it. I do. And I know, Uncle Vanya, that you have yet to see happiness in this life. I know. But just you wait. And then you'll see. We'll rest. We'll rest."
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