'Uncle Vanya' by Lantern Theater: Vintage Chekhov with a modern-day feel

If Russia's iconic playwright Anton Chekhov were alive today, he might have created the exact same script for Uncle Vanya that he wrote in 1896 - or so it seems at the striking Lantern Theater production that opened in Center City on Wednesday night.

That's because Kathryn MacMillan's production, whose cast brings off Uncle Vanya with a straightforward approach that could be labeled The Feel of Real, makes the classic fresh, as if it were newly plucked from some bush that blossoms with plays.

MacMillan, Lantern's associate artistic director, uses a smart translation by Mike Poulton that captures the play's struggling family of bored, frustrated Russians on their countryside family estate, but without the melodrama that frequently marks Chekhov's dialogue. The translation is written in natural, everyday English, yet it leaves Chekhov's 19th-century sensibility intact.

The result: You look onto a stage (Meghan Jones' pleasant drawing-room set) of characters clearly not of our time, but seemingly in it.

How does MacMillan do it? It takes more than a well-tailored translation, or even a cast with top-line acting talent, which the director assembled with spot-on matches of actor and character. The reason Lantern's production unspools so satisfyingly is the purring onstage machinery we can't really discern - its ensemble acting.

Not a single one of the eight actors - from Ann Gundersheimer, whose droll housemaid is the least germane of the roles, to Peter DeLaurier, whose live-wire title character is one of the meatiest - works apart from the others in the production. They are solidly interlocked.

This dynamic - the sense that we are watching one actor in eight bodies - makes everything Gundersheimer utters as effective as everything DeLaurier says and does on stage, and the same is true for everyone in between.

They are also exceptional in their interpretation of the play, and in line readings that sometimes seemed so organic that I thought this could be a documentary version of Uncle Vanya, unfolding without any script at all. But it is Chekhov all the way, a stage littered with unrequited passions and misspent lives.

Charlie DelMarcelle is the self-doubting doctor who visits the estate and becomes a fixture there during the summer of 1897, the time of the play. (The character is a curious one, given his plaintive air about being a physician, Chekhov's primary calling.) David Howey is the cranky retired art professor who is both suffering and insufferable, and Melissa Lynch is his demure and kind daughter, fraught with desire for the doctor.

Sarah Sanford, who this month won the $10,000 Barrymore Award for an emerging theater artist and often toils in Pig Iron Theatre's fields at the far edge of experimentation, is heart-and-soul in the classics here, as the art professor's young second wife. David Blatt is the hanger-on at the estate, and veteran actress Ceal Phelan is the family matriarch; she has few lines but an evening full of subtle yet powerful reactions to everyone else.

But then, everyone reacts just right to everyone else in this particular Uncle Vanya. That the eight actors do that in an eight-part harmony that plays throughout the evening and never wavers, that's the trick.

Presented by Lantern Theater Company at St. Stephen's Theater, 10th and Ludlow Streets, through Nov. 21. Tickets: $20-$36. Information: 215-829-0395 or www.lanterntheater.org.EndText