Why is it referred to as “Uncle Vanya”? All the person does is mope, mope more durable, attempt to do one thing apart from moping, fail miserably and mope some extra.

You may’t blame him. Vanya has spent most of his almost 50 years scraping skinny revenue from a provincial property, and never even for himself. The cash he makes, operating the farm along with his single niece, goes to assist life within the metropolis for his fatuous, gouty sort-of-ex-brother-in-law, an artwork professor who “is aware of nothing about artwork.” Additionally, Vanya is hopelessly in love with the previous man’s exquisitely languorous younger spouse, who, moderately sufficient, finds the moper pathetic.

In brief, he’s the other of the daring, laudable characters most writers of the late Nineties would identify a play for. That’s most likely simply why Chekhov did it, saying a brand new type of protagonist for a brand new type of drama. Life in his expertise having turned squalid and absurd, he may now not paint it for audiences as heroic. So how may his protagonist be a hero?

The “Uncle Vanya” that opened on Wednesday on the Vivian Beaumont Theater, its tenth Broadway revival in 100 years, sees Chekhov’s epochal wager and raises it. If Vanya is correctly no hero on this amusing however hardly ever deeply affecting manufacturing, it’s as a result of he’s nobody in any respect. He despairs and disappears.

That might appear to be fairly a trick, on condition that he’s performed by Steve Carell, the star of “The Workplace” and, maybe extra relevantly, “The 40-Yr-Outdated Virgin.” Carell’s Vanya imports from these appearances the weaselly overeagerness that makes you roll your eyes at him whereas additionally worrying about his psychological well being. He makes jokes that aren’t. He will get excited over all of the fallacious issues. Rain coming? He referred to as it.

With no digital camera skilled on such a person, you rapidly be taught to disregard him, as you’d in actual life. Certainly, in Lila Neugebauer’s modern, lucid staging, you barely discover Vanya whilst he makes his first entrance, hidden behind a bench. When he speaks you don’t pay far more consideration; in Heidi Schreck’s easy, devoted but colloquial new model, his first phrases, naturally, are complaints. “Ever because the professor confirmed up along with his partner,” he says, with a bitterly sarcastic spin on the final phrase, “my life has been whole chaos.”

It’s true that the professor — right here referred to as Alexander as a substitute of the Russian mouthful Aleksandr Vladimirovich Serebryakov — has thrown the family into disarray along with his calls for and pains and unearned hauteur. However his spouse, right here referred to as Elena, has been, if doable, much more disruptive.

Magnificence and tedium in shut quarters will try this. If Vanya is a malodorous canine she simply shoos away, a neighborhood physician, Astrov, proves the extra tempting companion. He’s clever, cynical and passionate, at first about ecology solely, however quickly about Elena as nicely.

Vanya is normally the linchpin of the plot. His envy of each Alexander and Astrov, his crush on Elena, his resentment of his mom (who delights in Alexander’s each apothegm), and his heedlessness of his niece’s wants (Sonia is in love with Astrov) all return to ding him like a comically inerrant boomerang. No marvel the function has been catnip for giant Broadway hams like Ralph Richardson, George C. Scott, Derek Jacobi and Nicol Williamson.

However Carell is not any ham: He’s exact, pure, unimposing. That’s an affordable selection given the textual content in vitro, which reads as a comedy of anticlimax. However in vivo, onstage, it ought to be, as nicely, a tragedy of inertia. For that you simply want a dominant Vanya with a rageful inside life.

That it doesn’t have one right here is just not deadly. Neugebauer is such an in depth director, honing each second and motion to a classy polish, that this usually attractive Lincoln Middle Theater manufacturing presents 100 issues to get pleasure from. Mimi Lien’s sylvan set, receding into the depths of the Beaumont stage, is one. Musical interludes, by the songwriter Andrew Hen, typically that includes accordion and violin, are one other, hanging the play’s jaunty melancholy excellent. Kaye Voyce’s modern costumes, rapidly figuring out every character’s standing and self-concept, are fantastic, and within the case of Elena’s knit attire with their form-hugging cuts, sensational.

So is the lady who wears them: Anika Noni Rose. Constructing on her historical past of ingénues (“Caroline, or Change”) and sirens (“Carmen Jones”), she arrives right here because the haunting query mark on the finish of everybody’s ideas. I’ve by no means seen an Elena so decisive and, on the similar time, so misplaced.

That’s a bonus of Carell ceding floor: The opposite characters have extra room to emerge. After all, the play at all times attracts consideration to Elena (written for Chekhov’s soon-to-be spouse) and Astrov (initially performed by Stanislavsky himself) as a result of they’re the one possible lovers. However right here, Astrov, given nice self-deprecatory wit by William Jackson Harper, is extra dimensional than regular, together with, for as soon as, an curiosity in bushes that’s as painfully visceral as his curiosity in Elena.

The supporting roles are simply as vividly stuffed. Alfred Molina because the professor is very luxurious casting; nailing the babyish self-regard of the academically pampered, he’s by no means funnier than when completely critical about his imaginary significance. As Sonia, Alison Capsule has clearly thought of what it means to have lived so lengthy along with her uncle, inhaling his grievance, not daring to credit score her personal. This makes her the one really dignified character: the one who makes you need to cry.

In any other case, I needed to snigger. Jayne Houdyshell creates an immediately recognizable sort out of Vanya’s mom: the classy Higher West Aspect woman in multicolor shmattes who reads political journals and might be skeptical about produce. Even Marina, the household’s former nanny, is given room for a depraved learn by Mia Katigbak. Lovingly resigned to the household’s foibles, she is nonetheless the pin of their sizzling air balloon.

If all this works nicely as mild comedy, the perfect Chekhov steadiness might require one thing heavier as ballast. I don’t simply imply a heavier central efficiency, one which believably builds to the well-known try at violence in Act III, and suffers its full penalties.

It might even be that Schreck — with the eager ear for unimpeded stream she demonstrated in “What the Constitution Means to Me,” on Broadway in 2019 — has wiped the textual content too clear of the specifics and formalities that may present helpful resistance. She units the play nowhere and at no time specifically: The cottage in Finland the professor needs to purchase turns into, on this model, an unmapped “seashore home”; cash is measured in what seems like modern {dollars}, but there are (thank God) no cellphones.

These small choices — and the manufacturing’s massive ones, too — make sense individually. Collectively, they add as much as a beautiful night within the theater. That’s not a backhanded praise. However I’ve a sense that if Chekhov heard “Uncle Vanya” described that means, nicely, he’d by no means cease moping.

Uncle Vanya
By means of June 16 on the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Manhattan; vanyabroadway.com. Operating time: 2 hours 25 minutes.