"Vanya on 42nd Street" takes place during a run-through of Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" inside the dilapidated New Amsterdam Theatre in New York City. Chekhov's classic play concerns an extended family and is set in the estate of Serybryakov, a retired professor who gained control of the land when his first wife died. In the past he's been an absentee landlord content to live off the revenues and allowing his daughter, Sonya, and his brother-in-law, Vanya, to run the place for him. But now at the play's opening, financial difficulties have forced him to return to the estate bringing with him his second wife, the alluring Yelena.