Dmitry Krymov has staged Uncle Vanya in New York, at the experimental theatre La MaMa. Yet Krymov’s audience, now scattered across the world and following the premiere online, saw the production as a personal message from the director, addressed directly to them.

“My feelings perish in vain, like a ray of sunlight that has fallen into a pit,” laments Ivan Petrovich Voinitsky in Chekhov’s play—the very character after whom it is named. In the Krymov Lab NYC version, this line is absent, as are many canonical quotations and familiar visual markers. Yet the life of the endearing neurotic Uncle Vanya, played by ZachFike Hodges, is, in a deeply Chekhovian sense, “irretrievably wasted.” And not only his life, but the lives of all the inhabitants of the retired professor’s estate, where painfully familiar scenes of rural existence unfold.

We recognize them easily, even though the set consists of little more than a single backdrop, its landscape barely sketched out in sharp lines. Created by Emona Stoykova, the image seems to echo the design of Krymov’s earlier productions in Moscow at the School of Dramatic Art, where black and white drawings were made before our eyes and instantly came to life, as in Opus No. 7. From there, Krymov has also carried over into Uncle Vanya Shostakovich’s waltz. From the very first notes played, those who had previously seen Opus found themselves in tears.

Ilya Ilyich dances the waltz with Yelena Andreyevna, just as he once danced with his runaway wife. No one remembers the name Ilya Ilyich Telegin, he is simply ‘Waffles’. The characters hold cardboard name cards, just in case. Amen Igbinosun’s Waffles is a powerful giant, his dark skin and snow-white suit fitting seamlessly into the production’s black-and-white canvas. By contrast, Professor Serebryakov, played by Colin Buckingham, barely reaches his wife’s waist - a woman who once fell in love with him for his talent and has remained trapped in an unhappy marriage ever since.

Everything and everyone revolves around Yelena Andreyevna, who, in Shelby Flannery’s performance, is lovely, gentle, and possessed of a light, airy presence. The other characters reveal themselves through their relation to her. Dressed in an almost Chekhovian costume, complete with an enormous hat, she recalls Masha Smolnikova in Seryozha, Krymov’s earlier stage version of Anna Karenina at the Moscow Art Theatre. Summer. Heat. The lady of the house tries to change, smoothing a sundress across the floor. But the stage fills with the other inhabitants; noisily they sit down, clattering Viennese-style chairs and destroying the intimacy of the moment. The dress is never put on. The beauty remains forever in her corset, short pantalettes, and lace stockings.

The performance opens with a hen - remember how the nanny worried that “Speckle has gone off with her chicks… the crows might carry them off.” And indeed they do, taking all but one, whose neck is twisted before our eyes, after which the nanny makes soup of it for the professor. Doctor Astrov, played by Javier Molina, gnaws the bones, while the unfortunate hen, played by MaryKate Glenn, is beaten and violated by the rooster; having lost her children, she tenderly gathers the remains of her chick into a napkin in order to bury them.

It is hardly necessary to comment on the resonance of this metaphor today: a mother burying her children. Here the charming, absurd humour of the production turns into a tragedy no one can stop. The world has gone mad; death has become commonplace. The crows will come, of course, and blood will spurt as in a Tarantino film, and Uncle Vanya will not merely fire a shot but unleash a burst from an automatic weapon. Not at himself. And he will not miss. Krymov is more radical than Chekhov: there will be no “everything in a person should be beautiful.” Instead, we are shown that everything - absolutely everything - exists within a human being.

It was worth waiting for the director’s post-show conversation with the audience, streamed live after the New York premiere, to hear Krymov explain that the black-and-white backdrop alludes to Van Gogh’s ‘Wheatfield with Crows’, one of his final paintings. On 19 July 1890, a couple of weeks after completing it, Van Gogh went out into a field and shot himself

Krymov is, first and foremost, a visual artist. The imagery we see throughout the performance was conceived by him as a skeletal structure derived from Van Gogh’s painting, while the text he wrote functions as a kind of skeletal framework for ‘Uncle Vanya’. Is a skeleton enough for us? That depends on what we are looking for.

It is striking that, even in 2026, one still has to explain that treating the classics not as a sacred ark but as works open to reinterpretation is not only permissible, but entirely logical and appropriate. Even without literal fidelity to the text, this theatre captures the spirit with precision. As in ‘Kostik’ (Krymov’s stark version of ‘The Seagull’) or his ‘Three Sisters’, retitled ‘Honoré de Balzac. Notes on Berdichev’. Balzac, as Solyony notes in ‘Three Sisters’, was married in Berdichev - but why does the director relocate the action to the Pale of Settlement, where dreams of Moscow appear utterly hopeless? Because Colonel Vershinin’s brigade, as we recall, is to be transferred either to the Kingdom of Poland or to Chita. The Chita idea was once realised by Yuri Pogrebnichko, who sent his characters to the Gulag. Krymov, instead, claimed the Jewish territories.

In ‘Uncle Vanya’, the cynical Astrov grumbles in advance about those who “will live a hundred or two hundred years after us and will despise us…” Well, a hundred years have indeed passed—more than that—since Chekhov began to reshape and dismantle traditional theatre with his plays. It is precisely this rupture that Krymov recreates again and again. In the United States he has already staged ‘The Cherry Orchard’. The audiences who come to his productions at La MaMa are as ready for this radical theatrical language as his Moscow audiences once were.

Those who seek will always find, in the new text, threads stretching back to the old; the joy of recognition cannot be abolished. After all, there have been more than a dozen English-language film and television adaptations of ‘Uncle Vanya’. Among them is Louis Malle’s ‘Vanya on 42nd Street’, made some thirty years ago, in which the actors of a struggling Broadway company rehearse, scene by scene, that same immortal melancholy.

Can it be conveyed through strict adherence to the canon? Can audiences once again be made to lose their bearings, to feel confusion and irritation as if for the first time, even when they know every line by heart? Or is it better to shatter the vase one again - to dissect the classic as if it were a corpse, and then reassemble it piece by piece, picking up the sharp shards and licking the wounds on one’s cut hands?