Everyone tells you Uncle Vanya is a play about sad Russians sighing in a drawing room. Everyone is wrong. It's a play about a real estate crime.

This week: the 1861 emancipation that charged twenty-three million people six percent interest on their own freedom, the forest law nobody remembers, and the reason Professor Serebryakov has no legal right whatsoever to sell the house he spends Act III trying to sell.

Nobody asked. But let's talk about it.