REVIEW: Uncle Vanya, with Split Lip Theater.

Upon immediate entry into the venue for Split Lip Theater's (no, not them) Uncle Vanya, you're going to hear snoring. That would be Vanya - or rather, Pete Laughlin as Vanya - sleeping in a chair right at the entrance. Sonya (Moriah Martel) will then check you in at the box office, and the Professor (Matt Morales Kelly) will guide you to the room where the show will be presented. The wall between performer and audience has immediately been broken, and one can't help wonder what else may break (in a good way) within the coming few hours.

The physical program that you receive at the box office continues this air of intentional foolishness, with actor bios filled with obviously fake information, advertisements for fake companies, and a note that the show will run about 145 minutes (it's only 100 minutes, fear not). This is Split Lip's 4th production, following three previous works of self-penned absurdism and experimental stagecraft, all with an anti-capitalist, pro-community bent, so one's expectations may understandably turn to irreverence. What kind of parodic, eye-poking take on Anton Chekhov's classic are we about to be a part of? How will Russia's most famous playwright get sent up and/or twisted around in Caleb Roitz's adaptation?

The answer is; not at all. The actors enter, the lights go up, and we are simply treated to what many audiences in Chicago have seen for decades before us; a group of young people earnestly giving their go at performing Chekhov in a church basement. Roitz's adaptation is fairly faithful to previous iterations before it (a few extra expletives have been added for good measure, but nothing else of note), even keeping the action of the play firmly planted in 19th century Russia, the actors dressed in period garb amidst a basement hideaway adorned in wooden furniture. As the evening continued on, any sense that the rug may be pulled out from under us all but evaporated, and the larger question started to come into focus; why did Split Lip choose to produce Uncle Vanya?

If you're going to choose a classic canonized play to perform, you could certainly find a worse option; Chekhov's work has been mined for theatrical gold over the many years, Uncle Vanya itself finding continued resonance onstage (Aaron Posner's meta-textual comedy Life Sucks., Annie Baker's raw and internal contemporary adaptation) and on film (the rehearsal room skeleton of Louis Malle's VANYA ON 42ND STREET, the emotional framing of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's DRIVE MY CAR). The play's notions concerning middle-aged malaise, lives gone astray, and paths not taken - not to mention deeper emphasis on climate crisis and economic disparity - are all emotional gateways that have been open to audiences and theatermakers for generations. Chekhov, and Vanya, have more to say about our current world than ever before.

So again I ask; why is Split Lip performing Uncle Vanya, other than the fact that it's a Good Play and they want to perform it (which, I suppose, is as fine enough a justification as one can have these days)? In previous online discussions of the work, Split Lip has said that "in some ways, doing something traditional is an unconventional choice," an explanation almost mirroring David Lynch's maxim that his G-rated Disney film THE STRAIGHT STORY was his "most experimental movie." But one can still find Lynch - his fixation on the beauty and ugliness of America, his care and empathy for the human spirit - within THE STRAIGHT STORY. Outside of their gag-filled playbill, there seems to be no sense of Split Lip's identity within Roitz's practically anonymous staging, no sense of urgency or intentionality behind any of the choices made. Chekhov's characters are rich in emotional complexity, his scenarios providing a formidable playground for actors to thrive. Here, many of the scenes lack any sense of drive at all, actors often just saying lines not because they feel that they must, but because that's simply the next line in the script.

In the titular role, Pete Laughlin is a formidable clown of a character in a production that never asks for a clown to be present. Vanya is certainly something of a pathetic character, but Laughlin seems to have seen the line "I've made myself into a joke" and decided to take that entirely too literally, his pathetic mewling and manic gesticulating teleported in from another production entirely, funny in its own right but completely out of sync with the rest of the action.

I am thrilled to say that a trio of performances do provide frequent salvation throughout the night: Moriah Martel's Sonya, Annaleigh Stone's Yelena, and Hannah Cruz's Astrov are all aligned in their mission to create earnest and honest characters, to access the natural humor of Chekhov's dialogue without needing to butter it in bits, and to emotionally drill into the various relationships they respectively navigate throughout the evening. Cruz especially, decked out in a phony mustache that threatens to upstage them entirely, walks the tragicomic tightrope so effortlessly that it's a genuine breath of fresh air whenever they walk back onstage; you know you're getting a performance of someone living in the same moment we are.

The first lights-down cue at the top of my show was immediately hampered by the stained glass windows behind us, the last moments of summer sun peeking into the room. Throughout the performance, too, the sounds of Rogers Park were unavoidable, with cars and bikes and ambulances wailing intermittently. The present day seems to be practically begging to become part of this Uncle Vanya. Why won't Split Lip let it in?

Uncle Vanya runs an estimated 100 minutes with no intermission, and performs at United Church of Rogers Park (1545 W. Morse) through June 22nd 2026. Tickets are available HERE.