Rehearsals with our great director Nicholas Martin began at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, and that turned out to be a wonderful bonding experience. Most of us lived in Manhattan, so we’d pile into cars, or train back and forth together. Once the play opened we’d stay over in Princeton, drinking after the show at night, going for a run or taking odd field trips during the day. In Act II Vanya mentions watching the movie Old Yeller as a child—Sigourney and Kristine and I watched it one night in my apartment, huddled together on the sofa, crying our eyes out. That bonding continued as we moved from Princeton to Lincoln Center and then to Broadway; audience members said the closeness of the company was palpable in performance. That might be worth remembering as you read—for all the fighting and jealousy and sibling rivalry in the play, there is much love between these characters, as there was between the actors who first played them.

Chris originally wrote the role of Vanya for himself (Chris is an actor as well), and the character is in many ways a quiet observer throughout most of the play. He is also a peacemaker, which I think Chris may have been at certain times in his own family. But like Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, this Vanya finally gets a chance to express himself. I don’t want to tell you too much about it, I hate when introductions give away what happens. However, I will say that when we had the first reading of the play, I started into that part, which I’d just thought of as funny and angry, and in the midst of it I became very emotional, which came as a surprise to me and everyone else. Apparently Chris had tapped into something, and as we moved from rehearsals to performance, we found the audiences thought so too.

Whatever that something is, I don’t want to name it. It has roots in the lighter, playful-seeming first act, and it blossoms in the fight, the phone call, the rant and the revelations of Act II. There are themes in the play—changes in the climate and in life, the loss of personal connection, the insanity of popular culture—that were particularly relevant to our audiences, and many people said that Chris articulated things they were thinking but hadn’t spoken. Like Chekhov before him, Chris has written a very particular comedy about very specific people, yet in the process he has touched on something universal.