LA Review: 'Ivanov'

Anton Chekhov wrote "Ivanov," his first full-length play, at the suggestion of Moscow theater owner Korsh, who expected a hilarious comedy in the vein of the author's boisterous one-act farces. Instead, he found himself with what he considered to be a turgid drama. Now, director Bart DeLorenzo proves that Chekhov did indeed write a comedy. In this production from the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Evidence Room that uses a new translation by Paul Schmidt, the play becomes a carnival of greed, gossip, pretense, complaining, backbiting, and boredom, with the character of the broken but essentially decent Nikolai Ivanov (Barry Del Sherman) as the still center of a storm of pettiness and folly.

Ivanov is a university-educated landowner who was once a man of high ideals and ambitions. He married a Jewish woman, Anna (Dorie Barton), whose wealthy family then disowned and disinherited her. Now he's been overcome by a malaise that he can't understand or shake off. (In our day he might be diagnosed as clinically depressed. The Russians called him a "superfluous man.") Ivanov has fallen out of love with his wife, who is dying of tuberculosis, though she still adores him. Her doctor, Lvov (Daniel Bess), is a jealous, self-righteous prig who blames his patient's husband for everything.

Ivanov is also saddled with an impoverished uncle, Shabelsky (Tom Fitzpatrick), and a drunken con man cousin, Borkin (Christian Leffler), who has so mismanaged Ivanov's estate that he has been forced to sell off his lands piece by piece. He has also had to borrow funds from his wealthy neighbors: Pasha Lebedev (John-David Keller), a well-meaning but ineffectual man, and his domineering wife, Zinaida (Eileen T'Kaye), a local moneylender. Their daughter, Sasha (Brittany Slattery), is a hopeless romantic who's obsessed with the notion that she can "save" Ivanov.

These are odd materials for a comedy, especially with two deaths and a tragic denouement, but DeLorenzo and his actors keep the proceedings funny by turning a sharp satiric eye on most of the characters, turning them into caricatures. It's not the only way to do the play, crammed as it is with disparate elements, but it works very well here.

Del Sherman plays the title character with admirable simplicity and sincerity, and Barton is equally straightforward and sympathetic as Anna. Leffler's Borkin is an extrovert and a loudmouth, the vulgar life of the vulgar party. Fitzpatrick captures Shabelsky's petulance as well as his pathos. Bess' Lvov uses his honesty as a bludgeon. Keller provides an affectionate portrait of Lebedev, sweetly touching in his shambling way, and T'Kaye's Zinaida is a miserly, dithering monomaniac as she starves her guests, begrudging them even the sugar for their tea. A large and colorful ensemble keeps the farcical whirligig spinning.

Presented by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Evidence Room at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A. April 14–June 15. Schedule varies. (310) 477-2055 or www.odysseytheatre.com.