Lila Neugebauer Interrogates the Ghosts of “Uncle Vanya”

The director was having a breakneck season. In December, she had opened a blockbuster Broadway revival of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “Appropriate”—a knockdown, drag-out inheritance drama set in a decaying plantation house, starring Sarah Paulson—and she was now negotiating its transfer to a larger venue. At the same time, she was in rehearsals at the Public for Itamar Moses’s “The Ally,” a weighty, campus-set play about a Jewish professor being urged to denounce Israeli policies, and she was deep into preparation for “Vanya,” finessing the script with Schreck.