age of vanya
TRANSCRIPT
Emerson College
Age of VanyaAuthor(s): Jeffrey HarrisonSource: Ploughshares, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Winter, 2005/2006), pp. 69-70Published by: PloughsharesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40353860 .
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JEFFREY HARRISON
AgeofVanya
Three months after my brother's death, I saw Uncle Vanya in New York. Near the end of the play, Vanya says he's forty-seven years old. I'd forgotten that, and the line caught me off-guard. Forty-seven was my brother's age when he killed himself. I wondered if there was something about being forty-seven - the very beginning of growing old - that makes a certain kind of person take the measure of his life and find it wanting, even unbearable. Did Andy feel that way?
A few years earlier, over Christmas, Andy and I had watched Vanya on 42nd Street together. We kept rewinding and replaying the scene near the end of Act Three, fascinated by Wally Shawn's performance of Vanya's tirade and lamentation, which was terrifying but somehow funny, mordant but pathetic. I almost don't want to admit we were laughing, yet I also hold our shared laughter dear. Now I wonder how close Vanya was to suicide, and when that possibility entered my brother's mind.
Approaching forty-seven myself now, I can say it hasn't entered mine. And yet, some days I have to remind myself my life isn't over, that I am still, by some measure, young, that I shouldn't give up and it isn't too late to get something done. There could be decades ahead,
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PLOUGHSHARES
or at least the thirteen years that Vanya gives himself. I tell myself it's just a phase, as our elders used to say annoyingly when we were teenagers. It's just the age of Vanya, something to dread, something to get beyond.
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