The Tower Players will present Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” Nov. 11-15, starring seniors Joshua Underwood, Mara Seeley, and Sophia Miggins.

“We design our season partially around the students that we know are going to be involved,” said James Brandon, professor of theatre and the play’s director. “I have three seniors whose senior project performances are part of this show, which is a lot of fun, because they’re working at a very high level for undergraduate actors.”

Brandon said Chekov is one of the most important playwrights of the 19th century. He wrote “Uncle Vanya” over the course of several years, and it premiered in 1899, serving as an extensive reworking of his play from a decade earlier, “The Wood Demon.”

The plot revolves around Uncle Vanya, a middle-aged Russian who works as estate manager for his brother-in-law, Professor Serebryakov. When the professor, who has recently remarried, retires and returns to his estate with his new wife, he disrupts the quiet country lives of Uncle Vanya and his niece Sonya, Serebryakov’s child by his first wife.

“For lack of a better term, the professor is kind of a thankless person,” Brandon said. “All these people have been working away for him, and he doesn’t really appreciate it. And, of course, there are a few different possible love matches. In fact, there’s even the possibility of an affair between a character and the professor’s wife.”

Meanwhile, the middle-aged bachelor Uncle Vanya feels that he’s wasted his life, while the people he’s wasted his life for don’t appreciate him, according to Brandon.

“There’s drama going on in this country estate,” Brandon said.

Miggins, who plays the role of Sonya, said she’s never seen Brandon so excited before about a play.

“He is just so enlivened with Chekhov, and it’s infectious, really,” Miggins said.

Brandon said he’s enjoyed collaborating with Associate Professor of French Anna Navrotskaya as assistant director of “Uncle Vanya.” Navrotskaya volunteered to help in order to learn more about the production side of theater, but her knowledge of the Russian language became very beneficial, according to Brandon. 

“She’s very familiar with literary and theoretical approaches to theater,” Brandon said. “She’s also Russian, so we’ve been looking at Chekhov’s original Russian when we’ve had questions, and it’s really helpful. She just wants to learn, and I’m sucking all possible knowledge I can out of her.”

Miggins said one of her favorite moments from rehearsals was when junior Winston Dugdale, who plays the role of the professor, asked if he could fall after being shot at.

“He then proceeds to tell the story of when one time his dad and he were running through the airport, and his dad fell, and then Winston recreated the way his dad fell so perfectly that I think we were in stitches for five minutes before we had to pull it back together,” Miggins said. “If nothing else, come see ‘Uncle Vanya’ so you can see Winston’s peak physical humor, because it’s hilarious.”

Both Brandon and Miggins agreed that “Uncle Vanya” concludes with a very Christian message about maintaining hope even during the darkest times of one’s life.

“It’s expressed near the end of the play by Sonya, actually,” Brandon said. “It doesn’t matter how much we suffer here as long as we know we’re going to heaven. Seeing characters who are really overwhelmed by negativity who can still maintain that point of view is beautiful and the best part of this play and this author.”