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“I’ve lost the the thread of who I am and why I’m alive.” How many of us have said something similar, if perhaps a bit less poetically? Maybe to a therapist? Psychotherapy as we know it didn’t exist in 1887, when Anton Chekhov wrote Ivanov, which became his first theatrical success. But anomie and depression, then called melancholia, sure did, and that’s just what this dark comedy is about.
Laura Strausfeld has adapted the four-acter into a 100-minute one-act that she calls The Real Ivanov. I don’t know why “the real,” but let that go. Having lost his grip on his life’s thread, Chekhov’s antihero Nikolai Ivanov’s plight was all too “real” from the start.
In the Dumps
Sam Underwood (“Dexter,” “Fear the Walking Dead”) leads the cast of this agile production with an inkily brilliant turn in the title role. Prominent among the excellent company around him are Sam Adegoke as Borkin, the always energized and optimistic manager of Ivanov’s estate; a buoyant Jordan Lage as Shabyelsky, Ivanov’s uncle, a count who’s lost his fortune and now relies on Ivanov and plays the unholy (and antisemitic) fool; and Ivory Aquino as Anna, Ivanov’s wife, a convert from Judaism.
Beyond broke, Ivanov can’t pay his peasant workers – extra painful for him as a social reformer. He can’t pay his debts to the frosty Zinaida Lebedev (Sarah Long) and her rich drunkard husband Pasha (a droll Spencer Aste). He can’t even afford to take Anna on the Crimean vacation that the tiresomely moralizing Dr. Lvov (Elijah Guo) assures him is the only hope to treat her tuberculosis.
As depression does, Ivanov’s mental malaise penetrates every aspect of life for him. He berates himself for having chosen “a life full of mistakes and stupidity.” They include everything from his social-reform activities to his not loving his wife as he should now that she’s ill. Lvov is no help, finding Ivanov “repugnant.” The attentions of the Lebedevs’ 20-year-old daughter Sasha (a compelling Amelia Mason) don’t help, and Anna’s faithful affection only makes him feel worse.
At the Theater
Strausfeld’s production relies on some old-school stage tropes that help create persuasive settings and moods with no sets and few props.
Lighting and freeze-framing create an out-of-time effect that foregrounds Ivanov’s tormented inner life. Underwood’s Ivanov also soliloquizes magnificently as part of his sustained bruiser of a performance.
Ivanov’s home is a bench and a book, the Lebedevs’ manse a white rug. A strip of crimson carpet defines the climactic scene from Act IV, outside the church where, a year later, the now-widowed Ivanov is about to marry the hopelessly devoted Sasha. I can’t remember where, but I’ve seen a staging before where a bunch of characters are lined up along one strip of the stage as they enact a scene. (And I’m not talking about the once-seemingly-eternal Line!) Here it effectively creates not only confusion and crowding but a sense of inevitability when Ivanov finally strides out of the constricted crowd and offstage.
Through the Ages
The production also conveys Chekhov’s themes in ways that resonate with what we recognize as unchanging human nature. Shabyelsky’s casual antisemitism is by no means a 19th-century relic. And it’s easy to accept Sasha’s naïve belief that she can turn Ivanov’s frown upside down through sheer love and devotion.
On that score, the play’s depiction of women’s subservience and exclusion from politics and business remains accurate in parts of today’s world, and now even outspokenly championed by some in the 21st-century West. Sasha has one of the play’s most cutting speeches near the end, after Ivanov asks why “women ignore men when they’re healthy but cling to them when they’re falling down a pit.”
“Any 19th-century women would prefer loving an unfortunate man than a fortunate one,” Sasha explains, “because we like to have something to do! A man has his work, and love is in the background. For us, love is our life. My work is curing you of your sadness.”
For a play about depression and despair, The Real Ivanov can be surprisingly curative of sadness, not because of anything the title depressive says or does, but because of the overflowing life force that motivates those he lives and hobnobs with to live their imperfect lives with enthusiasm, or at least acceptance – and sometimes with real hope.
The Real Ivanov from Initiative Productions is at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater (home of Classic Stage) in Manhattan through September 19, 2026. Schedule and tickets are available online.
