Lately, I’ve been going to shows with a friend who has not seen a lot of theater. As we sat down, she was peppering me with questions about Ivanov, but I did not have many answers. It was my first time seeing this early Chekhov play, known for its tone shifts from farce to melodrama.

The Real Ivanov is a shortened adaptation by Chekhov scholar Laura Strausfeld, who also directs. Strausfeld’s production has some brief, but strong visual moments and a few layered performances in supporting roles, but it did not unlock the play’s power for me.

Here, Nikolai Ivanov (Sam Underwood) is drifting through his thirties, struggling to understand how everything went wrong for him. Ivanov married Anna (Ivory Aquino), who converted from Judaism to Russian Orthodoxy to marry him. But her family disowned her and denied her a dowry. Now Ivanov has fallen out of love with her. To top things off, she’s dying of tuberculosis. She is tended to by the overwrought and uptight Dr. Lvov (Elijah Guo). While the doctor begs Ivanov to take action, he won’t pay to send Anna to Crimea to get better.

Ivanov’s resistance is purely monetary. He cannot pay his workers, and he’s deeply in debt to another landowner, Lebedev (Spencer Aste), and his thrifty wife Zinaida (Sarah Long).

Lebedev’s daughter, Sasha (Amelia Mason), is infatuated with Ivanov and thinks she can fix him (a theme with women in the play). He’s not immune to her attentions either.

So, Ivanov’s money troubles, love affairs, and a sense that he’s made mistakes in his life are weighing him down. His depression and his cloud of inertia prevent him from resolving his issues with Anna or his estate. Ivanov dreads that he is becoming a “whining Hamlet.”

I’ve always taken issue with the idea that Hamlet is actually whiny. His reasons for melancholy have always seemed reasonable to me. And his inertia is weighed against the face of something profound. If he takes action, nothing will ever be the same. There is a risk in going forward. So the stakes are high enough that debating action always made sense to me.

Ivanov’s problems are as real as Hamlet’s but more quotidian. If he pays his bills, bad things will not happen. Though nothing is as simple as that for someone who cannot untangle his own thoughts. Ivanov should be relatable as he expresses a malaise that is not unfamiliar to modern audiences.

But Underwood does not give his character enough other qualities. If he’s just sad and complaining about being sad, it’s hard to lock in.

Frankly, this Ivanov is not charismatic enough for one, let alone two, women to throw their lives away for him (the women really get the short shrift in this play). Yet they do.

He’s despicable enough to refuse his wife’s care, but also, he is tormented by his choices, knowing she has sacrificed everything for him and he has risked nothing.

The challenge of Chekhov is to play all the character contradictions so that they don’t feel inconsistent, but are true reflections of how torn the characters are between their own conflicting thoughts.

But Underwood gives one shade of hand-wringing anguish throughout. And I did not sense his own internal debate. For instance, he says, “You dislike me, doctor, and you say so. I admire you for that.” Is this self-loathing? Self-awareness? Sarcasm? Honesty? Or a slight blend of all these? I could not tell from Underwood’s delivery what Ivanov was feeling at all.

That said, there’s a noticeable increase in stage frivolity whenever Jordan Lage is on stage as Shabyelsky, Ivanov’s frustrated uncle. His Shabyelsky is bored, ignored, a schemer, and fully self-aware of his own scoundrel tendencies. “Everyone’s a scoundrel and hypocrite, myself especially,” he says, and you believe him. The shame Ivanov is always talking about is much more present in Lage’s performance, but he also finds the humor in the material. I believed he had a dead wife buried in Paris, and he wanted nothing more than a night out of the house for some revelry.

Spencer Aste, as Sasha’s father, also brought shades to his role. He’s powerless in the face of a controlling wife. He’s bumbling over Sasha and her impulses.

In a minimalist production, Strausfeld stages the play in the round with just a carpet or piece of furniture to establish the parameters of the space. But because of the staging, dialogue was lost entirely the minute someone faced away from you.

Further, the stage energy in group scenes never reached a fever pitch. A lot of the comedy just didn’t play. During Sasha’s birthday party, it seems as if we are meant to experience a crowded and lively event, with a running gag over a servant who is called relentlessly and never shows up. But the line delivery just kept falling flat.

The play needed better pacing overall. Strausfeld stages certain pivotal moments in an icy blue light, where time and space shift. It is particularly effective when Ivanov breaks out of the world as we know it.

Just as Ivanov needs others to make him see more of himself, the production benefits from breaking the framework from time to time.

But the production could have used bold strokes such as these more often.