The Real Ivanov Closes Saturday and a Contested Chekhov Is Exactly the Ticket Worth Grabbing

Chekhov wrote Ivanov in 1887, at twenty-seven, working fast and it was his first full-length play, which means it carries everything the later masterpieces learned to hide. Nobody stages it. For every production of The Seagull or Uncle Vanya an American city sees, Ivanov gets maybe a footnote, because the play is about a man whose defining quality is that he cannot make himself do anything and depression is famously hard to make watchable. So when an adaptation of it lands Off-Broadway, runs a month and sends the critics home disagreeing with each other, that’s not a warning label. For a certain kind of theatergoer that’s the whole invitation and the window on this one shuts Saturday, September 19.

What Strausfeld Built At 136 East 13th

The Real Ivanov: Diary of a Loser is writer-director Laura Strausfeld’s compression of the play down to 100 minutes and she comes to the cutting with credentials, a Chekhov scholar doing the trimming rather than a producer with a stopwatch. Initiative Productions stages it in the round at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater in the East Village and the venue is doing real work: exposed brick, string lights, a minimal set the cast moves themselves, entrances out of the room’s own recesses and the audience wrapped around Ivanov on all sides like the provincial town that won’t stop watching him. The staging-in-the-round choice is the production’s best idea. A man circled by spectators who judge his every failure is the play’s situation and here it’s also literally the seating chart.

Sam Underwood, familiar to television audiences from The Following and Dynasty, plays Nikolai Ivanov, mid-thirties, educated, broke, drowning in debt to a neighboring landowner and married to Anna (Ivory Aquino), who gave up her faith, her family and her dowry to marry him and who is now dying of tuberculosis while her husband falls out of love with her. The script has Ivanov diagnose himself as a “whining Hamlet,” and the adaptation’s sharpest instinct, more than one reviewer noticed, is how it watches everyone around him intellectualize his condition, confidently and wrongly, in a register that sounds uncomfortably like the present day.

Around the central couple: Amelia Mason as Sasha, the young woman certain she can fix him, Spencer Aste and Sarah Long as her fumbling father and flint-hearted mother, Jordan Lage as Ivanov’s shabby aristocrat uncle, Sam Adegoke, Underwood’s Dynasty castmate, bringing the comic oxygen as Borkin, the scheming estate manager, with Kimberlee Walker, Elijah Guo, William DeMeritt and Soph Metcalf filling out the town. A gun appears in the opening minutes. Anyone who knows their Chekhov knows the contract that prop signs and the production honors it.

The reviews disagree and I’d call that a selling point

Fair is fair: this production divided the press and anyone buying a ticket should know the shape of the division. The aggregate sits at 61 from twenty reviews and underneath that middling number is a genuine fight rather than a shrug. TheaterScene found Underwood’s performance “award-worthy,” a portrayal of melancholy carried in the whole body. New York Stage Review gave the same performance two stars. Some critics found the staging static and the leads disconnected, actors arriving from three different plays; others praised the icy-blue transitions where time bends and Ivanov steps outside the world and called the adaptation alive and ripe for argument.

I’ll take a side on what that split means. A 61 built from shrugs is a skippable show. A 61 built from a rave and a pan describing the same actor is a production doing something specific enough to polarize trained watchers and with material this rarely staged, seeing it and joining the argument beats reading about it every time. You may walk out agreeing with the pan. You’ll have seen Ivanov done, in the round, at close range, which is more than most American theatergoers can say across a whole lifetime of Chekhov revivals and the post-show argument over drinks is worth half the ticket by itself.

Where and when, while it’s still true

The Real Ivanov: Diary of a Loser plays through Saturday, September 19 at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater, 136 East 13th Street in Manhattan, between Third and Fourth Avenues in the East Village. The run began August 17, the piece runs 100 minutes and as of this writing you have less than a week of performances left, with closing weekends downtown having a way of selling out on the strength of exactly the word-of-mouth arguments described above. Tickets through the production’s box office and the usual Off-Broadway ticketing channels.

Chekhov’s later plays forgive their productions; the writing carries weak stagings and survives strong ones. Ivanov doesn’t extend that grace, which is why theaters avoid it and why a company willing to take it on for a month in a brick room on 13th Street deserves the last-week audience deciding for themselves. After Saturday the question goes back on the shelf and with this play, the shelf is where it usually stays for years.