With today’s opening night for the Classic Stage Company’s “Uncle Vanya”, first reviews and additional information are being published, including a first production still with Mamie Gummer and Peter Sarsgaard. Theatregoers are flies on the wall of the Russian country home of Classic Stage Company’s intimate new production of Uncle Vanya, opening Feb. 12 under the direction of Austin Pendleton. With a set lit by what seems to be moonlight, candles and oil lamps, the new production allows the audience to sit in the shadows, eavesdropping on the unspeakably sad and suffocating Anton Chekhov characters who aren’t at home even when they’re at home. The cast includes Tony Award winner Denis O’Hare as middle-aged Vanya, who has run his late sister’s estate for many years, in service of his professor/brother-in-law’s supposed greatness. The play famously finds Vanya and his worker-bee niece, Sonya (Mamie Gummer), questioning their roles in the house since the recent arrival of the now-retired scholar, Srebryakov (George Morfogen) and his young (dissatisfied) wife, Yelena (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Peter Sarsgaard plays the unhappy country doctor and environmentalist Astrov, who sees the physical world disappearing, and questions his place in it. More first reviews can be found at Playbill and The Villager.