ax Scholl

When I first saw Brooke Smith recite that final monologue of Anton Chekhov’s classic 1899 play Uncle Vanya in Louis Malle’s 1994 film Vanya on 42nd, something changed inside of me.

The play, set on a familial estate in the Russian countryside, follows a handful of characters each grappling with the purpose of their lives. Some confront the tedium of their lives by succumbing to sorrow; others, in bouts of denial, shake their fist at the world and attempt battling fate head-on, always resulting in failure. However, there was something special about that final monologue: or, the moment Sonya Alexandrovna comes to terms with the hardships of her life in a sweeping, despairing, yet nonetheless optimistic stroke of unbridled emotion. There was something about the way Smith delivered “But wait, Uncle Vanya, wait! We shall rest. We shall rest.” as the delicate, innocent, yet anguished Sonya that ran chills down my spine, with the gravitas and solemnity of a real-world existential crisis so suddenly upheaved by the credits rolling and the rest of the cast coming out to congratulate her—laughing, smiling—all in the same shot.

Immediately afterwards, I struggled to describe the impact the final scene had on me. The film, an uninterrupted rehearsal of Uncle Vanya set in a crumbling theater, is a part-fiction, part-documentary hybrid-film of sorts concerning the power of art and the creative process itself. It’s a film that is a metafictional rendition of a play about the struggle, tedium, and disappointment of ordinary life, where the consequences of the characters’ decisions are existential yet nonetheless miniscule on the universal scale. I spent the next couple of weeks continually writing and scrapping thousands of words in an attempt to extract why it hit me so particularly hard before, then, a message began to draw into focus: that art, itself, is cathartic. That art —not only through its own artistic narrative but also through a different level of meaning—has the potential to change our lives.

Vanya on 42nd inherently extends past the framework of art itself in its final scenes by revealing the ‘after’ of its doubly-fictitious stage play, reminding us that we’re watching a film and that the actors, too, are real people. It reminds us that everybody involved in the artistic process—from the audience to the artist—leads ordinary lives of each of their own immensity, proportions, and narratives, much like the characters of Uncle Vanya itself. We all have our own experiences of momentous changes-of-narrative—from catastrophic losses to striking revelations—that make up the fabric of our own existences. And what, exactly, allows us to retroactively examine the moments which define our very being? Well—from what Vanya on 42nd tells us—art itself.

It’s only art that has the power to redefine our lives and shatter our boundaries. It’s only art that has the power to treat our existential ailments—expressively or impressively—by helping us navigate the web of changes constituting our day-to-day existences. It’s only art that has the power to frame our tumultuous lives in terms of the eternal, giving us solace that these wild oscillations shattering our lives are ordinary experiences, teaching us how to deal with them, how to grapple with those emotions, transform them into something constructive rather than destructive.

This idea that art inexplicably possesses this ultimate, liberating power is one of the driving motivations behind Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Teen Council’s 13th biennial exhibition—titled Where Do We Go From Here?. Both the exhibition and the play demonstrate how art can be used as a means of transforming adversity into something therapeutic or even cleansing: artist Aileen Zhang in their piece Color Theory (2022) confronts the generational trauma and troubles of Vietnamese-American identity underlining the visage of one’s day-to-day life; the very piece, itself, is a resilient expression of acknowledgement and recognition towards one’s troubled heritage. Hoodie (2022), by Saj Baldwin, on the other hand, is a liberating expression of how it is to grow up–that we, while growing, are constituted by the fragmented memories of our past, and how these moments eventually become things that we wear - an idea that is inherently revelatory towards this idea of growing up. Lastly, the physicality of Large Spike (Bound Bodies) (2022) by Sophia Reinhardt, is, itself, a catharsis, an inherent expression of LGBTQ+ experiences represented by the piece’s remarkable presence in the museum space.

Like the decaying theater in Vanya on 42nd, the remnants of days long past will continue to exist, surrounding us and defining us like the actors in the film. Now, it’s only a matter of what we should do with the aftermath of our changes, essentially asking “Where do we go from here?”: should we shove these changes aside and ignore them, or actively address them, lest we remain stagnant?

Well - as Sonya Alexandrovna put best—“We shall rejoice and look back upon our sorrow here; a tender smile—and—we shall rest. We shall rest.”