As the lights come up on David Hare’s crisp adaptation of Ivanov (at the Vivian Beaumont), which Chekhov wrote in 1887 at the age of twenty-seven, we can make out the inevitable Russian birch trees and the inevitable murk of the Russian vastness. The landscape, which enforced a special quality of brutalizing boredom and agitation in provincial nineteenth-century life, is the backdrop—and perhaps even the shaping power—for what Chekhov saw as a defining national trait. “Russian excitability has one specific quality: it is quickly followed by fatigue,” he wrote to his friend and publisher Suvorin. “A man has hardly jumped off the school bench when he takes up, at fever heat, a burden above his strength: he takes on at once schools, the peasants, scientific farming … makes speeches, writes to Ministers, combats evil, applauds the good, falls in love. … But he has hardly reached thirty or thirty-five when he begins to feel fatigue and boredom.” Ivanov, an educated nobleman whose surname, like “Smith” in English, signifies the prototypical, is one such burnt-out case: a progressive farmer, a regional counsellor, a disenchanted husband of a tubercular wife, and a sensational failure. When we meet Ivanov (Kevin Kline), he is up to his eyeballs in debt to the Lebedevs, and unable to pay the workers on his estate. He is both literally and figuratively spent. He is, indeed, in the vanguard of collapse. In the play’s first image, Ivanov’s boorish steward, the blowhard Mikhail Borkin (Tom McGowan), sneaks up on him and, in jest, holds a gun to his head. “Misha, honestly, you know what my life’s like,” Ivanov says, immediately making a legend of his regrets. Ivanov can’t escape his little cave of consciousness; he’s unbiddable and unreachable. Borkin takes Ivanov’s hand and presses it to his chest to Ivanov can feel his irregular heartbeat. “I could drop dead any moment,” Borkin says. “Then what would you feel?” Ivanov, always the adept of entropy, answers, “I’d feel nothing.”

Ivanov ranks with Alceste, in Molière’s The Misanthrope, as one of drama’s great sourpusses, but, unlike Alceste, whose discontent is the product of intellectual vanity, Ivanov’s melancholy comes from his vulnerability. Drink, money, position, romance, gambling, the “perpetual drizzle of stupid conversations,” the posture of rectitude—all the delusions that distract the pesky local society and that Chekhov’s haphazard plot stages around Ivanov—don’t distract him. He’s continually thrown back on his own restless emptiness. “I feel terrible here,” he says. “I go to the Lebedevs’, I feel worse. I come home, I feel worse still. And so it goes. I am desperate.” He is inconsolable, which makes him irresistible to the Lebedevs’ twenty-year-old daughter, Sasha (Hope Davis), whom he jilts at the altar after his wife’s unmourned death. “You set yourself the task of saving me. The idea of resurrection, that’s what you love,” he tells Sasha. Here we see characters saying things that in Chekhov’s understated mature style he would show in the subtext. “The execution is no damned good,” Chekhov wrote a friend about Ivanov, “I ought to have waited!” He was not wrong; but in the creaky soliloquies and asides it’s interesting to see the vestiges of a kind of melodrama which Chekhov’s later, streamlined plays would blast from the stage. The characterization of Ivanov, however, is a considerable achievement, and it struck a nerve in Russian society. Ivanov’s contradictoriness, his sudden outbursts of rage (“You dirty Jew,” he yells at Anna, his wife, to the audible shock of the audience), and his bouts of self-loathing (“Oh, my God, the evil! How evil I am!”) are a somewhat crude but ambitious attempt to incarnate the ambiguity that was at the core of Chekhov’s notion of personality and his radical revision of Russian dramaturgy: to “show life and men as they are, and not as they would look if you put them on stilts.”

What Ivanov dramatizes is not just manic-depression but a particular crisis of faith: the half-life of resignation that follows the loss of an ideal. “I was full of faith, I believed,” Ivanov says. “So few people bother. I worked and loved and tried and hoped and gave, all in full measure, without even measuring, never stopping to think: am I giving too much?” Ivanov’s story is a short history of abdications: the romantic ideal (“I swore to love her for ever,” he says of his wife); the social ideal (“My estate is in ruins”); the political ideal (“I have no hope, no expectation. My sense of tomorrow is gone”). But Americans don’t live easily with the ironic undertow of such negative feeling. As a nation, we are optimistic and proactive. Our response to Ivanov’s chronic existential complaint would be to do something, see somebody, get busy. Although things look authentic on the play’s handsome set (designed by John Lee Beatty), they don’t feel it. American actors can’t really inhale the nihilistic ozone of Chekhov. So Gerald Gutierrez’s production is competent without being compelling. A kind of emotional gauze covers the proceedings: we see the outlines of the wounds without quite being touched by them. “I have not introduced a single villain nor an angel, although I could not refuse myself buffoons,” Chekhov wrote about the play. And although Gutierrez doesn’t really focus the social satire, the buffoonish caricatures do well: Marian Seldes as the malicious, penny-pinching Mrs. Lebedev; Jeff Weiss as the bridge-playing obsessive Kosykh; and William Preston as the bearded, bandy-legged old retainer Gavrila, who hasn’t a line but whose forlorn presence is hilariously precise. The casting of the main parts, however, seems strangely off kilter: Jayne Atkinson’s Anna, who loses everything for love, doesn’t find the tragic dimension in her solitude, and Hope Davis’s Sasha exhibits none of the character’s vaunted wit and charisma. Even an expert player like Kevin Kline, who powerfully conveys Ivanov’s honesty and intelligence, can’t seem to find the raw, nervy, spiritually deracinated mood of decline in the character. Max Wright’s charming, drunken Lebedev, alternately wishing his gargoylish wife dead and offering his friend Ivanov money behind her back (“Go over to the house, put it in her hand, and say to her, ‘Zinaida Savishna, here is your money, drop dead’”), is the most fully explored and vivid performance in this production. He and the rest of the wedding guests chase the gun-toting Ivanov around the drawing room, and in the ensuing farcical scrum the gun goes off almost as if by accident. Ivanov stumbles away from the pack and falls dead downstage. This plays as a happy ending of sorts. “Let me free!” are Ivanov’s last words; and, finally, he is.