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New York Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
My Life With Uncle Vanya, the Self-Pitying Sad Sack We Can't Quit
Why can't we ever get enough of Uncle Vanya? What is it about Anton Chekhov's incessantly complaining, self-pitying sad sack that makes him return anew to the theater more than any other dramatic protagonist maybe short of Hamlet, that other great melancholy inaction hero? The question has grown more pressing in the last two years, since there have been four new revivals of 'Uncle Vanya' in New York alone and another starring Hugh Bonneville that finished an acclaimed run at Shakespeare Theater in Washington earlier this month. Last year, the playwright Jon Robin Baitz argued that the play was in vogue partly because it was a 'study of post-Covid paralysis.' But 'Uncle Vanya' is always in fashion. I have seen 15 different versions in the last three decades, and I have come to believe that its enduring popularity is because of its flexibility. The old argument about whether 'Uncle Vanya' — which follows a series of emotional disasters that occur on a Russian country estate run by Vanya and his niece, Sonya — is a comedy or a tragedy misses the point. There's no one right way to perform it. I've seen it done funny and gloomy, cerebral and physical, small scale and broadly theatrical. What's most remarkable about the play is how it can sustain so many different approaches and still move audiences. Look at the actors who have played the title character in the past year. There's a world of difference between Andrew Scott, the star of the series 'Ripley,' and the comedian Steve Carell; between the defeated, passive man played by the Tony-winning theater director David Cromer and the aggressively cranky Bob Laine from the Brooklyn adaptation by the 'Dimes Square' playwright Matthew Gasda. 'Uncle Vanya' is to ambitious middle-aged actors what 'King Lear' is to older ones: a challenge and a mark of credibility. It's common practice to reimagine the plays of Shakespeare, shifting them into a different place and time. Chekhov's work can just as easily be transported from 19th-century Russia to a contemporary West Virginia or Ireland without strain. Its nimbleness has become especially apparent to me over the years. 'Uncle Vanya' ages well because it changes with age. The most unsettling moment in three decades of watching this play was during the first act of a whispery 2023 production in a downtown Manhattan loft lit by candlelight. As Vanya, Cromer, who directed two shows currently on Broadway, 'Dead Outlaw' and 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' was bemoaning how he has wasted his life. I'd seen this speech many times, but this one hit differently. Because while he wailed about his lost years, I realized, Oh, no, I am the same age as Vanya. I am tempted to go on a long tangent about how 47 in Russia more than a century ago was much older than it is now. But instead, a confession: The first time I met Vanya was when I was a teenager and he seemed like an extremely old and clownish bore. Now that I am his age, he comes off more sympathetic. Funny how that happens. His obsession with lost chances, the way he transforms thwarted ambition into simmering resentments that emerge as smirking mockery, his delusion about the writer he could have been — I recognize parts of myself here. When Vanya moans, 'I could have been a Dostoyevsky,' it used to seem absurd. Now I get it. The Vanya of my mind's eye, the face that pops to mind when he's evoked, is Wallace Shawn, who starred in the film version, 'Vanya on 42nd St.' It began with a superb cast featuring Larry Pine and Julianne Moore coming to work in street clothes, a fourth wall-busting gesture that has become fashionable if not clichéd. You see it in the Bonneville 'Uncle Vanya' as well as to a lesser degree in the revival with Scott, who begins by turning on the lights, making a cup of tea and adjusting the set. In contrast to those revivals, Shawn's Vanya had an unusual gravitas, a mature weariness and slow burn, his gripes more potent because you could tell he was holding back. The drama critic Kenneth Tynan called Vanya one 'of the least playable heroes in dramatic literature' because he is so hard to take seriously. But if we don't take him seriously, Tynan argued, the play falls apart. It's the kind of categorical statement that critics and scholars, not to mention artists, often make about Chekhov. My mother's college acting teacher insisted that Vanya must be played as suffering from hemorrhoids (a conviction unsupported by the script). But consider the miraculous work being done by Scott, playing all the roles through quick-changing physicality. He plays Vanya as a man stuck in arrested development, walking onstage in sunglasses, larking around with a plastic device that plays comic sounds like wolf whistles or a recorded laugh track. He is easy to see as ridiculous (as is this show, which includes a smoldering sex scene between a man and a door). Yet the production, powered by the charisma and Scott's bold choices, holds together. The plot of 'Uncle Vanya' is spurred by a visit from Sonya's father, the ex-husband of Vanya's sister, and Yelena, his bored second wife, whose beauty distracts all the men around her. I've attended the last few productions of 'Uncle Vanya' with my teenage daughter, and seeing the play through her eyes clarified how Vanya need not be central to a production. The play can be relatable to young audiences and old, women as well as men. The title itself, 'Uncle Vanya,' invites you to consider young Sonya's perspective. She quietly harbored a crush on the environmentalist Doctor Astrov for six years, until finally Yelena offers to act as an intermediary to learn his true feelings for her. People have long complained that nothing happens in 'Uncle Vanya' — Tolstoy told an actor, 'it doesn't go anywhere' — but the high-stakes romantic move by Sonya and Yelena is not just a nerve-racking story line. It's a central narrative of middle-school recess. In a revelatory performance in a Sydney Theater production in 2012, a dancing and pratfalling Cate Blanchett proved that 'Uncle Vanya' could be as lively and funny as it is morose — and made a case that Yelena was its catalytic main character. But in the new spate of modern productions, 'Uncle Vanya' seems like Sonya's play. She has the standard pathologies of the Instagram era: hyper alert to her physical flaws; deathly insecure; and holding on to the time she overheard someone gossiping about her. Her relationship with Vanya also underlines another element of the play: Vanya as father figure. He has rubbed off on her, and not in the best ways. Sonya can be competitive about who is more unhappy. The most memorable performances from this play have been from actresses playing this role. In my favorite production of 'Uncle Vanya' — the recent National Theater revival starring Tony Jones — Amie Lou Wood (Chelsea on the recent season of 'The White Lotus) delivered a heartbreaking, lustful performance that emphasizes the line about the unattractiveness of her teeth. Melanie Field, in the Washington production, contorts her face into a grotesque mask of pain upon describing herself as 'plain.' For the recent loft production in downtown Manhattan, Marin Ireland portrayed the most fully imagined Sonya I've seen. She makes you feel the pain of embarrassment, but also the excitement of plotting with Yelena, the conspiratorial high of a fleeting friendship. The optimism on her face makes you see that this play is not only about people constantly annoying each other, but also trying and failing to connect. Seeing all these different versions of 'Uncle Vanya' makes clear that another reason artists and audiences keep returning to the play is it's as full of hope (doomed as it might be) as it is of frustration. This can be hard to see, because characters are constantly describing their misery, and quite flamboyantly. After all, one well-received modern adaptation is titled 'Life Sucks.' From a certain view, Sonya and Vanya end the play in a place not unlike where they were at the start, minus a few illusions. The world presented here is bleak and unforgiving in ways that will be altogether familiar to an audience today, in ways that are personal, social and even environmental. Sonya's resilient final speech — 'What can we do? We must live our lives.' — offers a narrow path forward, in work and the afterlife. But one doesn't need either to find solace in this famous last vignette. Vanya and Sonia have each other. In almost all the versions, she seems to keep going because of him. Sonia's last line, spoken next to Vanya, is imagining a better future: 'We shall rest.' The key word is 'we.' It's worth recalling that the first time Chekhov tried this play, it was called 'The Wood Demon,' and he had the Vanya character kill himself. (It flopped.) When he reworked it, he let him live. Vanya made some moves toward killing himself, like stealing a bottle of morphine, but Sonia found him out and forced him to give it back. It's one of the most important edits in the history of theater. Dying by suicide would not only have been darker (there goes the debate about comedy versus tragedy), but also less open to interpretation. Death is nothing if not conclusive. This play is about something more understandable to the living: failure. Vanya tries and fails to get the girl, the career and the revenge he craves. He's so ineffectual that he can't even kill himself. It's pathetic and wonderful, depending how you look at it.
The Guardian
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Brightening Air review – shades of Vanya as a Sligo family squabble, tease and wrestle
Conor McPherson's family dysfunctional drama seems to take its inspiration from numerous sources: the title is a quote from WB Yeats's poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus, which lends it an air of poetic mysticism. There are shades of Uncle Vanya, a play McPherson has adapted, with a plot involving a family reuniting in the countryside to feud over the ownership of land and inheritance. There are elements of the American family dysfunction drama too, though this is distinctly Irish in its cadence, rhythm and setting. Individually, each influence is valid and every idea is a good one but together the play seems to swing on its hinges, like this family's clapped out farm-door. We are in the rural depths of County Sligo in 1981, inside a household run by two siblings: the stoic Stephen (Brian Gleeson), who is existing rather than living, and the eccentric and autistic Billie (Rosie Sheehy). They are marooned on the down-at-heel farm, just about making ends meet until their wealthier brother, Dermot (Chris O'Dowd) drops by. His presence coincides with the arrival of an old blind uncle and former clergyman (Seán McGinley) who has been ejected from church quarters and now shuffles into the family home with his housekeeper, Elizabeth (Derbhle Crotty), with a dispute over the farm's ownership – though this plot point does not emerge until late on. Comfy domesticity offsets abrasive sibling undercurrents as they gather around a dining table to eat, reminiscence and poke each other. McPherson, who also directs, throws in other tensions: Dermot comes with his inappropriately young squeeze, Freya (Aisling Kearns) while his estranged wife, Lydia (Hannah Morrish), still in love with her husband, puts her faith in 'magic water' that might return him to her. The pace is too easy in the first half, as the flotsam and jetsam of family life float by. There is a good Chekhovian mix of melancholy and humour in the cross-conversational currents between family members, but it all needs more momentum and emotional drive. The second half brings more intensity but also a plot that feels stretched to aburdism: there is a miracle in the vein of the biblical Bartimaeus (the blind beggar from Jericho) alongside the falling out and making up over inheritance. The mystical element sits well within the plotline of the magic water but becomes pronounced and protruding when characters talk about God and nothingness. You get the sense of a playwright preoccupied by big questions about the afterlife (with repeated mentions of reincarnation and the Ganges) but this sometimes sounds non sequitur in the mouths of his characters. There are none of the explosions of an American dysfunction drama here and angry face-offs between siblings steer close to the humorous and absurd. Sibling ribbing sometimes combusts into something more; there is wrestling between brothers, the lone sister is one of the 'lads', and home truths are occasionally spoken, or shouted, but you wish these scenes would dig into a few more nerves. Still, there are heaps of charm and a few searing moments. McPherson's last work at the Old Vic was the musical Girl from the North Country, and there is music here too, though it is not a musical. Lovely dramatic interludes feature piano music, songs carrying Celtic lilts but also, puzzlingly, a Bollywood number. An incredibly strong cast is gathered: O'Dowd is a delight as the family's self-regarding eldest brother and Sheehy, as always, is a standout force. She plays a largely comic character but infuses Billie with great emotion. The idea of love and its yearning is shown with delicacy. Every character seems unrequited, from the farmhand (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty) who is sweet on Billie, to the sexual undercurrents that swirl around Stephen and Lydia. Rae Smith's set is beautiful, full of diaphanous, overlying images of trees, water, misty mountains, sky, conjuring a vivid sense of place but also carrying a certain otherworldly magic. Sometimes this production lifts off, as if it is about to enter into the sublime, but is strangely dragged down by too many elements jostling to take flight. At the Old Vic, London, until 14 June.
Irish Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Brightening Air at the Old Vic review: Conor McPherson's outstanding new play turns convention on its head
The Brightening Air Old Vic Theatre, London ★★★★★ The Brightening Air, a new play by Conor McPherson , the writer best known for haunting works that blend the numinous and the normal in dingy, drink-soaked Irish rooms, begins where most plays end: with the descent of a curtain. This is apt for a production that reconfigures theatrical devices and Irish folk tales to explore how we cope when our dreams collide with reality. The play, a nod to Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, is set in a crumbling house that one wouldn't want to live in at the best of times, let alone in Sligo in the 1980s. Yet that's where we find the emotionally gnarled Stephen ( Brian Gleeson ) and his brash sister, Billie (Rosie Sheehy), mucking along in the family home and insulating each other from the world. They're helped occasionally by a sturdy local lad, Brendan (Eimhin FitzGerald Doherty), who likes Billie despite her best efforts. The siblings' not-quite-peace is disturbed by the arrival of Uncle Pierre ( Seán McGinley ), a newly blind, 'more or less excommunicated' priest, and their older brother, Desmond ( Chris O'Dowd ), who owns a string of successful cafes and wears the leather jacket to prove it. Pierre has his long-suffering help, Elizabeth ( Derbhle Crotty ), in tow, while Desmond has unwisely come with both his wife, Lydia (Hannah Morrish), and Freya (Aisling Kearns), his 19-year-old employee and lover. READ MORE The Brightening Air: Chris O'Dowd and Hannah Morrish. Photograph: Manuel Harlan As if the arrival of unwanted family members weren't bad enough, the interlopers seem to have designs on the house. By early afternoon the group is drinking, swearing inventively and talking about dead relatives. It's an Irish play, all right. Yet The Brightening Air, which McPherson also directs, is far from conventional. Beneath the tropes (there's a dramatic reading of a previously undisclosed will), mundane familial bitterness (recriminations over which sibling refused to install a downstairs toilet) and hilarious one-liners (most of them unprintable), the play explores the mysteries of living. The Brightening Air: Rosie Sheehy and Hannah Morrish. Photograph: Manuel Harlan It asks why people decide to stay or go, why we love those who don't love us back, what we inherit from family and whether we can shake off 'the life that's on us'. Above all, the play is interested in how ordinary people cope with not knowing the answer to those questions. Some rely on the uncanny, like Lydia, who hopes that water from an enchanted well will make her husband love her again. Others, with no stories left to tell themselves, decide that to live is simply 'to forget'. The Brightening Air, by Conor McPherson, at the Old Vic in London. Photograph: Manuel Harlan The pervasive sense of a dream just out of reach is amplified by Rae Smith's beautiful, sparse set, made up of diaphanous fabrics and scattered furniture, and by Mark Henderson's subtle lighting design that eventually creates nothing out of something. The excellent ensemble cast delights and devastates throughout, and the occasionally stilted direction of the early scenes never really threatens the piece as a whole. In one wistful moment Elizabeth says that life is like ice, and people use pleasure to skate over the pain. This play certainly doesn't. The Brightening Air may glide along, propelled by laughter and comforting theatrical conventions, but McPherson always insists that we look below the surface. The Brightening Air is at the Old Vic , London, until Saturday, June 14th
New York Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
13 Off Broadway Shows to Tempt You in April
Theater in New York is nearing its seasonal crescendo, with stages Off Broadway and beyond teeming with activity. Of the many notable productions happening in April, here is a baker's dozen to tantalize you. The composer-lyricist Adam Gwon, best known for the chamber musical 'Ordinary Days' and more recently for the charming 'Macbeth' riff 'Scotland, PA,' sets his new musical in the 1990s in a conservative small town, where a gay high school teacher is helping a student to prepare for a statewide theater competition. With a cast of four that includes Elizabeth Stanley ('Jagged Little Pill'), Jonathan Silverstein directs for Keen Company — his swan-song production as artistic director of the theater, which commissioned this musical. (Through May 10, Theater Row) The Obie Award-winning director Jack Serio loves intimate, nontraditional venues — like the lofts where he staged his breakthrough production of 'Uncle Vanya' — and he has one for this new play by Ken Urban ('Nibbler'). With the audience at close range, arrayed around a living-room-like space, Ryan Spahn and Juan Castano play a married couple enduring a sexual dry spell, and Julia Chan plays the long-lost high school girlfriend whose reappearance rattles their relationship. (Through April 20, East Village Basement) A major production of any Caryl Churchill play becomes a reason for pilgrimage by the faithful. Now here is a program of four brief works by the 86-year-old playwright, a master of shape-shifting and the short form; three are from 2019, one from 2021. Her longtime interpreter James Macdonald, who staged Churchill's 'Top Girls' on Broadway, directs a large cast that includes the Tony Award winner Deirdre O'Connell and John Ellison Conlee. (Through May 11, Public Theater) The cleverly inventive, very funny playwrights Emma Horwitz ('Mary Gets Hers') and Bailey Williams ('Events,' 'Coach Coach') are also the performers of this comedy, which appeared in an earlier form at last year's Exponential Festival of experimental work. A co-production of New Georges, which incubated the show, and Rattlestick Theater, it is directed by Tara Elliott. (Through April 26, Here Arts Center) 'Derry Girls' fans, assemble. Saoirse-Monica Jackson, who starred as Erin on that hit TV series set in Northern Ireland, makes her New York theater debut with this backstage comedy by Ciara Elizabeth Smyth, directed in its world premiere by Nicola Murphy Dubey. In an ensemble cast that also includes Kate Burton, Jackson plays a member of the Dublin-based Irishtown Players, rehearsing a Broadway-bound show whose author has diluted an ingredient the actors are determined to strengthen: its Irishness. Part of the Origin 1st Irish Festival. (Through May 25, Irish Repertory Theater) The Broadway star Norm Lewis ('The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess') headlines this drama by Lonne Elder III, playing a widowed barber and former vaudevillian in 1950s Harlem, where he and his grown children live upstairs from the not exactly busy shop. The Negro Ensemble Company — which gave the show its first professional production in 1969, with Douglas Turner Ward in the lead — teams up with the Peccadillo Theater Company and Eric Falkenstein for this revival, directed by Clinton Turner Davis. (April 11-May 18, Theater at St. Clement's) The Obie-winning playwright-director Shayok Misha Chowdhury ('Public Obscenities') recruited his mother, Bulbul Chakraborty, a physicist and professor, to create and perform this new show with him. A co-production of the Bushwick Starr, Here and Ma-Yi Theater Company, it takes its title from what Merriam-Webster defines as 'a science dealing with the deformation and flow of matter.' Chakraborty studies sand. Her son studies her. This is a kind of memoir. (April 15-May 3, Bushwick Starr) There is a certain sort of effusively unhinged experimental theater that feels particular to downtown Manhattan. The collaborations between Robert Lyons (late of the scrappy, shuttered New Ohio Theater) and Daniel Irizarry are absolutely this brand of weird. Written by Lyons and directed by Irizarry, who also stars, their new show is set in academia, where a professor is losing his grip on reality and grad students are hallucinating a manifesto. Also, there will be rum. (April 18-May 4, La MaMa) Lincoln Center Theater's small, adventurous upstairs stage, LCT3, breaks its recent quiet with the world premiere of this dark comedy by Caitlin Saylor Stephens ('Modern Swimwear'), starring Elizabeth Marvel as a fashion photographer shooting a Vogue cover in Europe. Morgan Green directs. (April 19-June 1, Claire Tow Theater) Witchfinder General is a job title so absurdly dystopian that surely it must be made up, but there really was one in 17th-century England: Matthew Hopkins, who hunted down women he suspected of being witches. In Joanna Carrick's play, which she directs in the Brits Off Broadway festival, Hopkins's stepsister is a skeptic amid the religious panic he fans. Then the death of her babies tempts her toward the comfort of finding someone to blame. (April 24-May 11, 59E59 Theaters) Marisa Tomei and the dancer Ida Saki perform this new dance theater piece, which puts a contemporary female lens on the myth of Sisyphus. In this retelling — written, choreographed and directed by Celia Rowlson-Hall ('Smile 2') — Sisyphean labors come with being a woman in the world. (April 24-April 26, Baryshnikov Arts) James Joyce's mammoth 1922 novel, 'Ulysses,' had to battle its way to publication in the United States. Initially it was banned here as obscene — until a judge ruled, in 1933, that though its effect 'is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.' Borrowing from period radio style, this 90-minute comic drama by Colin Murphy re-enacts and remixes that landmark free-speech fight. Conall Morrison directs this production, an import from Ireland. (April 30-June 1, Irish Arts Center) Anika Noni Rose (a Tony winner for 'Caroline, or Change') and Aisha Jackson ('Once Upon a One More Time') star as sisters from Ohio who follow their artistic ambitions to New York in this Encores! revival of the 1953 musical comedy classic. With music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and a book by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, it's directed by Zhailon Levingston, who last year co-directed the much-acclaimed radical refresh 'Cats: The Jellicle Ball.' (April 30-May 11, New York City Center)
New York Times
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Andrew Scott on ‘Vanya': ‘Who Isn't Sad?'
'I really believe that we all do contain multitudes,' Andrew Scott said on a Friday morning in March. Scott may contain more than most. An actor of unusual sensitivity and verve, he is starring, solo, in an Off Broadway production of Chekhov's melancholy comedy 'Uncle Vanya.' The title, like the cast list, has also been condensed, to just 'Vanya.' The New York transfer of this London production had opened a few nights before. In this version, the playwright Simon Stephens has relocated the action from 19th-century Russia to rural Ireland in more or less the present day. Scott plays the central character, a man who has sacrificed his own ambition to support his feckless brother-in-law. He also plays the brother-in-law, the put-upon niece, the neglected young wife, and several others. Scott is alone onstage throughout. That stage can feel very crowded. The New York Times critic Jesse Green described Scott, in performance, as a 'human Swiss Army knife.' Mindful of Scott's work in 'Fleabag,' 'Ripley' and the recent film 'All of Us Strangers,' Green also referred to Scott as a 'sadness machine.' This is a popular opinion. Variety has called him 'Hollywood's new prince of heartache.' On this morning, Scott, 48, did not appear unusually sad, though he was somewhat rumpled. The plan had been to walk over to Little Island and then along the Hudson River, toward the theater, but severe weather had changed that. 'Oh my God, it's windy,' he said, out on the street. ('You can't get sick,' his publicist fretted.) So Scott had retreated, with a breakfast burrito and a Day-Glo orange juice, to the shelter of a nearby pier. Its windows looked out onto the river. The water — choppy, gray-green — reflected in his eyes. In person, Scott is serious, though he wears that seriousness lightly. And if his intelligence and empathy are obvious, he wears these lightly, too. Vanity eludes him. (Even aware he would be photographed, he arrives with his hair looking like it has never known a comb.) And I thought, as he sat cross-legged on a bench, wearing a nubby brown cardigan, that I have rarely met an actor with less pretense or affectation. Later he took off that cardigan. On his red shirt, a heart was embroidered, just over the breast. Scott did not plan to play all the roles in 'Vanya.' Despite moving the action to Ireland, Stephens, a playwright with whom Scott has often collaborated, had written a more traditional adaptation of the play. But during an early read through with Stephens and the director, Sam Yates, Scott had a scene in which he took both parts. Something electric happened. Initially, despite that electricity, Scott resisted. He worried that playing all the roles would feel like a gimmick or perhaps an empty exercise. But as he got to know the play better, he began to see the connections among the characters. 'They're all just talking about their own very particular pain and how it's a very singular thing,' he said. 'Actually, all of them are much more similar to each other than they say.' Having a single actor onstage, erasing the physical difference between the characters, would only emphasize this. Rehearsals were rigorous, but also magical in their way. Learning the lines was hard — 'so [expletive] hard,' Scott said, but then again he had played Hamlet, so he could handle it. He didn't want to do elaborate accents, though close listeners, and Irish listeners in particular, will distinguish differences of class and locale among the characters. And costume changes (Scott wears his own clothes throughout) were nixed. So he contented himself with finding gestures and small props to define each person. Michael, a country doctor, bounces a tennis ball; Ivan, the Vanya of the title, wears sunglasses and toys with a sound-effects machine; Sonia, Ivan's niece, wrings a dishrag. As the play goes on, these props and gestures fall away and it's only Scott's energy that defines the roles. 'You don't want the audience going: Which one is this?' he said. 'But you do want them to do a little bit of work, a little bit of leaning forward.' Somehow it all succeeds. Even in scenes in which Scott has to canoodle with himself, there is clarity. And surprising heat. (If you are one of the legions of fans obsessed with Scott's Hot Priest character on the TV comedy 'Fleabag,' maybe it's not so surprising.) 'It's representing sex in a very fundamental way,' he said. In every scene, Scott is incredibly specific in where he looks, how he stands, where he places the other characters. Sometimes, alone onstage, he has to adjust his step so that he won't run into them. 'It's just an endless experiment,' he said. 'I'm still learning about it all the time.' Scott doesn't think he's any more sad than most people, though he knows that he often plays sad characters, the 'Vanya' ones among them. (He also, worryingly, has a line ('Ripley,' 'Sherlock') in psychopaths.) He recognizes his talent for empathy and he knows that he is perhaps better at understanding and conveying emotion than most. 'But not just sadness,' he said. 'I laugh very easily. The idea that people are sensitive or vulnerable in some ways, I find very, very beautiful. So I don't have fear of that. Or at least I don't have a big fear.' And really, what's more universal than sadness? 'Who isn't sad?' he said. 'Like, who isn't sad? I don't get that.' 'Vanya,' on its face, is a play about wasted potential. So it's the gentlest kind of irony that in performing it, Scott isn't wasting his. Sometimes that prospect is daunting. 'It's a potentially scary thing to think that you might live up to your potential every time you do the play,' he said. Often he wakes up in the morning and thinks he won't be able to do it again that night. But then he does, making himself a vessel for humanity, in all its multitudes and contradictions. As an actor, he's just large enough to contain it all. 'The fact that we all behave in absolutely monstrous, beautiful, completely contradictory ways as human beings, that's what my job is to represent,' he said.
