CHEKHOV'S VANYA ON EVERY STREET

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Astrov's obsession is just one aspect of the play's preoccupation with time. His medical training encourages him to see the world as his patient. The prognosis is grim: Russia's forests are being stripped, its fauna decimated, its rivers defiled. But in Vanya's eyes, time is static. Boredom, frustration, tedium will reign eternally. The choice these two philosophers contrive is desolate: the world is going to hell, or it's already there.

More than any other Russian playwright, Chekhov is perceived in America as relevant to our age. This may be owing to his trafficking in gloom (any impulse toward optimism being, of course, evidence of callowness). But even his darkest interludes are subtle and variegated. There's a vivid moment in one of his stories when an awestruck boy beholds a flash of lightning: "someone seemed to strike a match in the sky." Something lovely is always dancing beyond Chekhov's horizon, toward which his characters gaze with palpable yearning.

Perhaps it is this hint of the ideal that accounts for Vanya's continuing attraction. Even if nothing much happens onstage, everything is happening on that other, imagined stage-a world of fulfilled passions, where scholarship leads to wisdom, industry to affluence, sexual desire to spiritual communion. Chekhov's impulse is transcendent. At his best he evokes an ethereal theater where angels perform in front of angels.