"Neugebauer and Schreck had removed “Vanya” from nineteenth-century Russia, instead setting it in an American near-future, which meant that the context for gun ownership had changed."
"Cutting the samovars and the patronymics is one way to modernize and de-Russify Chekhov, and Schreck has carefully pruned her “Vanya” of its nineteenth-century markers. But the casting of Neugebauer’s production, too, brings you into the modern day, often because the actors invite other associations.
"One of the first reference images that the show’s set designer, Mimi Lien, sent around was Anselm Kiefer’s 1997 painting “The Renowned Orders of the Night,” in which a man lies either dreaming or dead under an immense starry sky. The expressionistic set for “Vanya”—a photograph of a forest far upstage, gusts of actual rain—has what so many Neugebauer sets have, a sense that we are just stepping out of the circle of safe, human lamplight."
