No one plays exasperation quite like Steve Carell, the gifted comic actor who sparks some needed life into an otherwise dreary revival of Uncle Vanya now playing at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont space. As Vanya, the middle-aged caretaker of a country estate who feels he’s frittered his life away on a pointless career and unrequited love affairs, Carell projects a sad-sack energy that recalls his performance in Little Miss Sunshine as another depressive uncle who makes his presence known despite a supposed tendency to cede into the background.

Carell is matched nicely with another sitcom veteran, William Jackson Harper, who gives the local physician Astrov a savvy mix of intelligence and obliviousness as he navigates an unwitting love triangle with Vanya’s besotted niece, Sonia (Alison Pill, playing youthful in a way that makes her age unclear) and Sonia’s very-much-married stepmom, Yelena (Anika Noni Rose), the much-younger second wife of a pompous retired university professor (played with old-fashioned bluster by Alfred Molina).

Carell and Harper are easily the best part of director Lila Neugebauer’s mostly lethargic production, bringing a kinetic energy to the proceedings even when their characters are describing their boredom or listlessness. Too often, the rest of the cast seems to feeling their way around the material — or operating in different shows altogether. Rose in particular seems adrift, and not in an intentional way, as she careens between awkward encounters with all of the major characters. Yelena is a notoriously tricky role, but the best actresses can give a sense of a character who is deliberately adrift and actively striving for connection and purpose.

Playwright Heidi Schreck’s new adaptation, which includes an admirable use of modern language and modern dress (costumes by Kaye Voyce), strives to present the Anton Chekhov chestnut in a kind of timeless setting — an idea that’s reinforced by Mimi Lien’s set design, which manages to be both spare and overproduced. Much of the action takes place on Beaumont’s thrust stage, overloaded with old-fashioned furniture, while the main stage space houses receding backdrops and framing walls that remind us of how barebones the production could be. Even an onstage rainstorm toward the end of the first act fails to deliver much dramatic impact.