In Uncle Vanya, Alison Pill Contemplates Life, the Universe and Audience Etiquette

At a recent performance of Lincoln Center Theater's Uncle Vanya, a couple of audience members returned to their front-row seats after intermission with a bag of pretzels each, then proceeded to munch away during the play's second half.

On stage, the actress Alison Pill—who thinks of the theater as her church—was flabbergasted. “I mean, you're right there. You're lit. You're very obviously in the living room with us,” she said in a phone interview recently. “I caught the eye of the woman. I was like, Really?’”

By her own frank admission, Pill has an antagonistic relationship with audiences. While playing Helen Keller’s blind tutor Anne Sullivan in The Miracle Worker at the Circle in the Square, she would purposefully kick the shins of audience members whose legs extended into the performance space. At some point she also developed the habit of picking out audience members who bugged her—thinking to herself, "That f**king guy is getting it tonight!”—in order to aggressively direct her performance at them.

As she has succinctly put it, “I hate audiences.”

But it’s difficult to square Pill’s purported dislike of audiences with the performance she’s giving, eight times a week, at Lincoln Center Theater's Vivian Beaumont Theater.

In the midst of a starry ensemble that includes Steve Carell, William Jackson Harper, Anika Noni Rose and Alfred Molina, Pill’s performance as the long-suffering Sonia is the beating heart of the production, just as her Sonia is the beating heart of the onstage household. It is a generous, effusive offering to attentive, non-snacking audience members.

And yet, not unlike one of Chekhov’s regret-haunted characters, Pill wouldn’t mind a do-over. Since the show’s opening in April, she has been bedeviled by the myriad alternative acting choices she might have made.

“Really what I want to be able to do is to sort of do a month one way, and then kind of switch things up, do another version the next month,” she said. “I just want to be able to revisit some of these decisions and just think about the subtext differently.”

For Pill, whose New York stage credits include an emotionally raw performance in Blackbird opposite Jeff Daniels and, most recently, Three Tall Women with Laurie Metcalf and Glenda Jackson, Chekhov felt like a new and daunting challenge. “A lot of shows you have much more of a map, and if you click into it, you can make it work,” said Pill. “Chekhov does not lay it out for us. He doesn't even tell you how long has passed between act one and act two. He tells you it's September in act three, so you're like, cool, cool... Working back from there...”

Early in the rehearsal process, the director Lila Neugebauer, translator Heidi Schreck and the cast engaged in lengthy discussions to puzzle out the characters’ personal and shared backstories; a five-foot-long timeline charting a detailed family history was tacked onto the wall of the rehearsal room. Days were spent “asking tough questions together”: When did Sonia’s mother die? What was Yelena and the Professor’s courtship like? What is really at the heart of the bitterness between Sonia and Yelena? Where did Uncle Vanya get that gun?

Pill was as tirelessly inquisitive as anyone, eagerly gathering morsels of information that might fuel her performance. “I am obsessed with very specific, literal details. I was the one in the rehearsal room who just kept asking about the timeline and kept asking about the cooler with the food and what the lunch was going to be.

“That kind of work for me was incredibly important. It shifts the meaning of things. And it became so clear within even a couple of days of table work that with just one different person in this ensemble, it would be an entirely different show, which feels incredibly powerful.”

One of the crucial decisions Pill arrived at early on is that Sonia—not unlike Pill herself—is in her thirties. When Sonia is rejected by the impassioned doctor Astrov (played by Harper), it’s more than just the crushing disappointment of unrequited love—it’s something more existential. The snuffing out of Sonia’s inner light, as embodied by Pill, is the most emotionally wrenching moment in the show.

“It becomes a question that Lila and I as women in our late thirties contend with,” said Pill. “What does it mean for fertility? What does it mean for babies? There’s so much about Sonia’s crisis that is a particularly female crisis. It is a childbearing person’s crisis."

Pill added, “If anybody in this play was going to actually commit suicide, it's Sonia. She's a doer. She knows that she could. But she doesn’t. Because of her optimism. Because of her belief in God and something bigger than herself. And because she sees that people need her.”

Uncle Vanya was first produced in 1899; this version, the tenth Broadway revival of the play, takes place, as Pill puts it, in a here-ish place at a now-ish time. Chekhov was so future-thinking, it really does feel like acting in a modern play. “We still know all these people. These are not hard people to know. They exist in our lives. They exist in our neighborhoods. And there's something really beautiful about that.”

The contemporary setting means that, instead of being confined to period dress, Pill gets to wear a cozy cardigan in the second half of the show. “It’s a really cozy cardigan. As Lila put it, ‘The best knitwear to walk the American stage.’ Ted Smith’s name is written in the back of it. I don’t know who Ted is. But it’s just the perfect thing. It’s lived a life.”

In some scenes, under Neugebauer’s audacious, expansive direction, soliloquizing characters seem to be transported away from physical reality to a cosmic plane. The abysmal darkness of Mimi Lien’s set creates the impression of Chekhov's characters as lost souls grasping for meaning in an incomprehensible universe. It’s a fitting vision for what has been described as Chekhov’s most spiritual, even most religious work.

In her final speech—lyrically translated by Schreck—Sonia tenderly shares her belief that the struggle of life is worthwhile. The spiritual undertones of the play resonate deeply with Pill, who became a devoted church-goer relatively recently. (If theater is her church, she said, church is also her church.) “It’s full of God,” she said of the play. “It’s full of angels. It’s full of these larger concepts that can be discomforting to a modern secular audience. But it’s also like… I don’t know what else you can do except think that maybe there’s something bigger than this.

“The consideration of the infinite is an incredibly important human endeavor in whatever form it takes, in these meager existences that we try and cobble together. And I think that's something Chekhov saw.”

There’s also something profound about theatergoers commiserating with each other, across the centuries, about the disappointment of life. “It strikes me almost every night, when Astrov talks about ‘Maybe people a hundred years from now will figure out how to be happy…’ We are those people.”

As well as discussing their characters’ backstories, the cast of Uncle Vanya discussed what might happen to their characters after the events of the play. Pill finds comfort in her own belief that Sonia is going to be okay. “I don’t know what the future brings, but I like to imagine her back at the market, meeting somebody else at a nice produce stand. It’s kind of cute.”

In any case, navigating the darknesses and disillusionments of Uncle Vanya has been a happier undertaking as part of a supportive ensemble. Pill had an existing rapport with some of her co-stars: she played Carell’s daughter in Dan in Real Life, had a “text-message book club” with Rose and knows Molina socially (“Just the nicest human that’s ever walked the planet.”) Long past opening night, the actors have kept up their communal pre-show warm-up ritual. “I can’t imagine doing Chekhov with jerks,” said Pill. “I really can’t. It's so difficult. You all have to make these team decisions all the time.

“At no point is it about anyone’s ego or desire for center stage or sabotage. You know what I mean? If any of that existed in this ensemble, I just don't know how you do it, really. It would be so much harder. And it's already hard.”

Her acerbic, hyperbolic pronouncements notwithstanding, one gets the sense speaking with Pill that, actually, she loves audiences. In fact, she is deeply appreciative of the complex dialogue that occurs every night between the stage and stalls. Night to night, she said, the show feels vastly different: Laugh lines change. The feeling in the room feels lighter or heavier. Audience allegiances shift from character to character. A recent school matinee performance had the raucous atmosphere of a rock concert, she said.

“What’s beautiful about performing this particular play is that non-guarantee,” said Pill. “I've been in shows where once you lock it in, unless there's just a crowd of snoozers, you will get laughs on certain things.

“It’s fascinating, observing the audience figure out what kind of crowd they are, what kind of character they're going to be in that performance. Everybody finds cohesion around what kind of show they're watching. That discovery of the audience's character is especially beautiful.”