Review: Eight Andrew Scotts in a Heartbreaking Solo ‘Vanya’

In the original text it is merely a kiss, or as mere as a kiss can be between a beautiful young woman and her husband’s handsome doctor. In any case, knowing as we do from the long-simmering buildup how much the doctor loves her — and likely she him — we accept and even require their moment of consummation, sensing it will be the only deep happiness either ever feels.

That kiss, between Astrov and Yelena, as their names are traditionally given, is the sadder of the two sad climaxes of “Uncle Vanya,” Chekhov’s tragicomic comic tragedy about work and waste. (The funnier sad climax occurs when the title character tries to shoot the husband and misses, twice, at close range.) Whatever else happens in a production of the play, the would-be lovers’ intimacy needs to mark an extreme turn in the characters’ lives and in the narrative’s emotional temperature as it comes in for its final landing.

So you’d think the moment would totally flop if both he and she were played by one actor.

Yet in “Vanya,” the Chekhov adaptation that opened on Tuesday at the Lucille Lortel Theater, the encounter is about as erotic as any the legitimate stage has offered, even though it involves just a door, two arms and the human Swiss Army knife Andrew Scott.

Granted, it’s more than a smooch. Scott basically humps the door. And when he claws off his shirt, it is from both characters’ backs.

But this is not just a stunt to see whether a single actor can pull off a full-cast classic. As adapted by Simon Stephens, the author of “Heisenberg,” “Sea Wall” and other gripping dramas, “Vanya” is deeply serious and generally faithful in its engagement with Chekhov, offering not just a modernized gloss on the play’s language and settings (the husband is a pompous old filmmaker instead of a pompous old scholar) but also a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty.

And anyway, what’s so wrong with a stunt when it becomes a tour de force? Who doesn’t gasp with delight at a bicyclist doing cartwheels on a tightrope? Scott is endlessly and polymorphously resourceful, with an armamentarium of voices, faces, postures and ideas that in various combinations add up to a thousand specific effects. And though I already knew this from his “regular” roles in movies like “All of Us Strangers,” and from a solo multicamera pandemic experiment called “Three Kings,” he produces these effects with no strain and no false modesty, and without ever dropping the ball of emotion.