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‘Uncle Vanya’ in four acts, four rooms

Stages

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

December 21, 2011|By Joel Brown

John Kuntz plays the title character and Marissa Rae Roberts is Elena. (Danielle Fauteux Jacques )

CHELSEA - Turns out it’s not that far from here to 19th-century Russia.

Beginning next Thursday, the Apollinaire Theatre Company will use the high ceilings and architectural details of its 1906 building to its advantage, turning the Chelsea Theatre Works into a fading 1890s country estate for Craig Lucas’s adaptation of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.’’ Each of the four acts will take place in a different space in the grand but weary former Odd Fellows Hall, so the audience for each performance has been capped at 30.

“We start in the biggest room, and as we work our way through the play, the rooms start getting close, until in the last act we’re all sort of intimately together in this room that’s pretty small,’’ says John Kuntz, who stars as Vanya. “I kind of like that idea, that sense of people being trapped on this estate.’’

Apollinaire’s “Uncle Vanya’’ is not exactly site-specific, as the first act takes place outdoors and will be staged in the building’s third-floor theater. The other three scenes will take place in rooms on the second floor.

“We’re on two tracks, the rehearsals at night where we’re trying to build the life of the play, and then the work in the day, where we’re trying to build the environment that it’s going to be in,’’ director Danielle Fauteux Jacques says. She’s sitting amid paint cans and props at the theater just before the first “stumble-through,’’ an early rehearsal of the entire play, top to bottom. “It’s exciting when they start to come together.’’

It’s not easy, however. “We’re furnishing four different spaces and repainting and looking for artwork, and also we’re looking at the common spaces and how best to integrate them into the world, so it’s not this jarring thing where [audiences] are in one world and then they pop out,’’ she says. “So it’s a fairly massive undertaking to retool the whole building.’’

Environmental theater performed in nontraditional spaces is not exactly a new idea, but it gained fresh attention locally with the British troupe Punchdrunk’s “Sleep No More,’’ which took over a vacant school in Brookline two years ago for its hit American Repertory Theater run. Kuntz, speaking by phone, points out that this “Vanya’’ is very different from the immersive “Sleep No More,’’ with its idea of “wandering through and seeing whatever and making your own theater experience.’’