On a crumbling 19th-century Russian estate, the monotonous lives of a middle-aged man and his hard-working niece are thrown into turmoil when her narcissistic, retired professor father arrives with his much younger new wife.

Hate that I’m about to be the pearl-clutcher here, but I don’t think this adaptation or the one-man gimmick are effective ways to deliver this story—the original tone and understated humor are pretty well-trampled—nor do I feel that any satisfying substitute interpretation is on offer. I’m pretty open to the form (recently loved “Dorian Gray” and “David Greenspan”) but I had a hard time rationalizing this one as anything other than a stunt to show off some Capital-A Acting.

It’s definitely a pretty amazing feat by Andrew Scott to make this mostly intelligible and vaguely resonant, but the result is still only a mostly-intelligible and vaguely-resonant play, and I was honestly dying to get out of the theater for about the last thirty minutes. He’s wildly talented, but this production isn’t it for me.