Vanya on 42nd Street

Introduction by Annie Baker and Wallace Shawn

Over several years in the late 1980s and early ’90s, renowned stage director André Gregory convened a group of established theater actors in an abandoned Broadway theater for a recurring private performance workshop, for which the unofficial cast would come together occasionally to rehearse a stripped-down staging of David Mamet’s adaptation of the great Chekhov play Uncle Vanya. Building on the success of this project, Gregory reteamed with My Dinner with André director Louis Malle and co-star/co-writer Wallace Shawn (playing the titular Vanya) to develop a filmed version of the makeshift troupe’s rehearsals. The result, which would turn out to be Malle’s final film, is a sneakily playful hybrid artifact, a pseudo-documentary reenactment of the real-life spectacle of theater actors at work—most notably a young Julianne Moore, then fresh off her star-making turn in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts.