Poor Uncle Vanya. Is there a more consistently bummed-out character in the long history of literary sad-sackery? He begins the play bitter: 47, still single, and unlikely to find a lady since he’s in the country managing his dead sister’s estate for his homely niece, who seems bound for spinsterhood herself. Then things get worse. His pompous brother-in-law moves in with his new wife—the guy’s a jerk, Vanya falls for the wife, she rejects him, and he catches her making out with his drinking buddy (the country doctor). The brother-in-law proposes selling the estate out from under the family, Vanya has a breakdown, and tries to shoot the brother-in-law but misses. Twice. Then he toys with suicide but doesn’t get that right, either. It ends with the niece soothingly reminding him that he’ll have peace when he’s dead. And you think you’ve had a tough week.
For this production, Akropolis Performance Lab has set up shop on the ground floor of The Garden House, a hunk of Victorian architecture on Beacon Hill (and the headquarters for the Washington State Federation of Garden Clubs). It’s an almost uncomfortably intimate setup with around 16 folding chairs and actors sighing, shouting, and grumbling so close, one is tempted to reach out and offer a comforting pat on the back.
Joseph Lavy, who directs and plays the title role, begins the action by dragging his metaphorical baggage onstage with a rope: several large wooden chests that contain props and will double as furniture, topped with a large rocking chair. As he hustles around setting the stage, the cast sings a mournful Russian tune in a sweet, many-part harmony. The music, directed by Zhenya Lavy (who also translated this world-premiere version of the script), is one of the best things about the show—15 musical numbers, most of them gauzily melancholy but crisply performed, occasionally with Zhenya keeping time on a wooden spinning wheel in a corner of the room.
The acting is less consistent. For such a gloomy character, Lavy has directed himself to be unusually vociferous, with more thumping on tabletops and thundering around the stage than your typical chronic Russian depressive. The other actors vary in confidence and ease, some more stiff and performative, others less so. But Samantha Routh as the young wife Elena successfully captures the vague yearning that afflicts her character, drifting in and out of the room with her chin held high, a glorious pile of lustrous dark hair, and an unsettled look in her eyes.
She and the rest of the characters feel a little bit more than they’d like to, which maybe explains why they drink so much. As the country doctor (a deep-voiced and stoic Carter Rodriquez) says when he finishes a story about a patient who died on the operating table: “Just then, when they were least needed, my feelings awoke.” 
