The New Yorker:

A director of the modern uncanny steers the first Broadway production of Chekhov’s masterpiece in twenty years.

By Helen Shaw

One late-January day, the director Lila Neugebauer was at a gun range—or an antiseptic, fluorescent-white version of one—tucked inside the Specialists, Ltd., a theatrical-props behemoth in Ridgewood, Queens. Neugebauer, accompanied by two members of her team, had come to discuss a gun for her upcoming production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” at Lincoln Center Theatre. The production is a starry one, with Steve Carell in the title role, alongside Alfred Molina, Alison Pill, Anika Noni Rose, and William Jackson Harper. With a new translation by the playwright Heidi Schreck—who was nominated for a Tony for her women’s-rights jeremiad “What the Constitution Means to Me”—this is the first Broadway staging of Chekhov’s masterpiece in more than twenty years.

Neugebauer is small and quick, with flyaway black hair, straight black brows crossing a narrow face, and intent gray-green-golden eyes, like a fox’s. She is a rarity among New York theatrical directors, both for her relative youth—she’s thirty-eight, with the career of someone a generation older—and for her recent move into film. According to Jennifer Lawrence, who starred in Neugebauer’s 2022 movie début, “Causeway,” about a soldier recovering from a brain injury, she is a “tiny genius with a boom in one hand and a sword in the other.”

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