Uncle Vanya, A New Version By Annie Baker

We were up in San Luis Obispo and took a walk to the campus of Cal Poly.

In the college bookstore, among the unsold textbooks, I found this and bought it:

Man, I felt like Keats looking into Chapman’s Homer reading this thing.  These lifeless translations can kill you when you take on foreign literature.  The bad translation can put you off a whole literature for the rest of your life.  In college I was supposed to read one of Chekhov’s plays.  Trying to save a couple bucks bought the Dover Thrift translation, which is probably worse than putting the Russian into Google Translate. (We didn’t have Google Translate then, children).

I KNEW something was wrong here.  There was something about Chekhov that moved people to tears, there was a reason theater people were still talking about Uncle Vanya.

You think this guy didn’t know what he was doing?

Well, anyway, in this Annie Baker edition, you can feel it.  The pain and the sadness and the funniness and the absurdity and the humanity of the whole situation.  Man.

Five stars.