Dimitri Krymov at La Mama

A Trickster’s Reckoning: Krymov’s Uncle Vanya

Dmitry Krymov’s Uncle Vanya is no revival—it is a tragic buffonade staged by a gleeful theatrical trickster. Krymov approaches the Russian canon with a brazen lack of shame, prodding and ridiculing the “sacred” until it splinters. Each of Anton Chekhov’s characters is either inflated to absurdity or twisted into a grotesque inversion of their familiar selves.

In a world this deranged, the only creature that earns genuine compassion is a mother hen. Krymov’s device is as blunt as it is merciless: the hen loses her chick, while the humans have lost only their sense of purpose. By the final curtain, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that they deserve to be shot more than any chicken deserves to be boiled and eaten.

Vanya himself is stripped clean of dignity. His tragedy is no longer the noble waste of a life spent in service to an empty, narcissistic professor—it is the dull, suffocating reality of being a schmuck. His “Jewish” mother becomes the trickster’s accomplice, needling him with relentless reminders of his insignificance. When the pressure finally ruptures, the revolt is absolute: Vanya guns down seven characters, splattering the stage with blood, only to be degraded—finally, fittingly—into a chicken himself.

The moral lands like a bucket of cold water: enough mourning the ruins of a “great” Russian past. Wake up, intelligentsia—you’ve already been shot, boiled, and devoured by the modernity!

Special recognition is due to Dmitry Krymov for casting Shelby Flannery as the perfect Yelena. Her performance stretches in a wide arc between playful absurdity and fierce compassion. Parading in provocative underwear, she becomes the magnetic center of the production—the live wire that ignites every emotional outburst within this fractured “family.” The show may begin awkwardly, even clumsily, but it gathers force and coherence as she pulls the surrounding chaos into her orbit.