They met, over the course of more than four years, whenever their professional schedules allowed, without any plan to perform before an audience. The production began in 1989, as an extended workshop under the guidance of André Gregory, perhaps the most gifted stage director in America, who assembled a superb cast of actors to rehearse Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the abandoned Victory Theater on Forty-second Street. In the long history of stage-to-screen translations, there’s never been anything quite like Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), an astonishing hybrid blurring the boundaries between theater and film, rehearsal and performance, actor and character.
