Riverside Theatre’s Second Stage debut this season is an existential comedy in an existential crisis.
The hilarious “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” Christopher Durang’s 2013 Tony-award winning, Chekhov-inspired farce about three siblings at mid-life’s loose ends, is closing on Sunday less than two weeks after it opened.
Beware of missed opportunities, as the play’s soothsaying housekeeper might warn, and try to get to this show this weekend. If you can’t, well then, wallow in your Chekhovian sense of loss.
Leave it to Durang to make us howl at the bleakness of the human condition. The story line is all his, and its outrageousness is typical of his comedies. Verging on absurdist but with very accessible humor, the play drops hints of “Three Sisters,” “The Cherry Orchard,” “Uncle Vanya” and “The Seagull” (and probably more).
You don’t have to be familiar with the great Russian writer to appreciate the play. An early line alone says it all – the brother and sisters were all given names from Chekhov’s plays by their college professor parents who were very active in community theater. You get the gene pool.
A middle-aged gay brother and adopted sister, Vanya and Sonia (Warren Kelley and Susan Cella), are left unemployed and undervalued after their parents’ deaths. They live together (she wishes a bit more intimately) in their childhood home in Bucks County, Penn., with little to do to break routine than brood, which Sonia does incessantly.
Vanya even suggests medication to help Sonia’s mood.
“If everyone took anti-depressants, Chekhov would have had nothing to write about,” says Sonia.
Enter their rich sister Masha, played with progressively self-sabotaging narcissism by Stacey Logan. An actress with half-a-dozen Broadway credits to her name, Logan has for years wintered on Vero’s barrier island. This is her Riverside debut, though a year ago she played the part of Masha in her hometown of Oklahoma City. She is longtime friends with the production’s excellent director, Jimmy Brennan, a regular at Riverside who has known Logan since their days working together in Broadway’s “Crazy For You.”
Masha is a beautiful, once-successful actress who of late isn’t getting a lot of roles. She arrives with her much younger boy toy, Spike (Brian Ogilvie – who looks like he just swallowed a sparkler). Spike spends much of the play stripped to his underwear – to Masha’s delight and Vanya’s closeted misery – twitching his spectacularly pumped muscles, including the one in his head.
Masha rules the roost here: she owns the house and financially supports her siblings. So she thinks nothing of demanding a minor payback on this visit. Invited to a costume party by some important neighbors, she wants to set off her plastic-looking Disney-animation Snow White costume by making everyone else play dwarfs.
She also expects to break the news that the house won’t be theirs to live in for long. But before we know it, she’s as broken down as the other two, howling with insecurities, clinging to Spike, pleading for the glamour of her lost youth.
Her cookie further crumbles when Sonia eschews playing Dopey and decides instead to be the Evil Queen, and she appears in a tiara and shimmering silver sheath. Languorously spreading her Michelle Obama-worthy arms along the back of the couch, Cella subtly transforms Sonia before our eyes, delivering Sonia’s burgeoning belief in herself with a shaky but unstoppable confidence.
Challenged that her outfit has nothing to do with Snow White, Sonia explains that her character is actually the actress Maggie Smith doing an interpretation of the Evil Queen on Oscar night. That community-theater gene suddenly shows itself in a spot-on impersonation – “n-n-n-nomin-A-tions” –that it brings down the house.
After the party, Masha is beside herself that Sonia got so much attention.
“Anyone who wears a tiara and sequins is always going to be the winner!” she declares in what may be Masha’s most lucid moment.
The day after the party, the status quo devolves. Cassandra the psychic housekeeper played by Kathel Carlson, tries a little black magic to undo Masha’s house-selling. Nina, the young aspiring actress from next door, played by Morgan MacInnes, boosts the humble Vanya’s ego by asking him to do a reading of the play he’s secretly written, the fleshing out of a play that Konstantin is writing in Chekhov’s “The Seagull.”
As the reading gets underway, the otherwise low-key Vanya has his A-list moment going off when Spike starts texting. His tirade against technology – “We licked postage stamps!” – is a marathon of nostalgia, and a masterpiece of monologue by Kelley. There is a hint in his delivery that Vanya, undone, is aware of going too far. He knows about cell phone rudeness, he’s just so removed from the world that he’s never experienced it.
And it turns out, Spike was texting Masha’s personal assistant, with whom he is sexually involved – surprise, surprise. But Masha doesn’t take it well. Like texting, even meaningless sex has its protocols, for people of a certain age at least.
But it is Sonia’s phone call from an admirer at the party, who clearly is confused by her on-and-off British accent, that gives the play a decidedly non-Chekhovian sense of hopefulness. The caller asks her for a date, and Cella registers all this beautifully. Sonia’s life may be about to change after all.
The play provoked opening night barks of laughter from not just Riverside’s usual audience – who likely found the trio’s mid-life crises affecting, but also from a sizeable cluster of twenty-somethings in the back of the room.
Even if quality were the only measure (setting aside hilarity, intelligence and relatability), not a seat in the house should have been empty for this show even as a 700-seat Main Stage production (as several in the audience remarked afterwards it should have been.) For it to have run in the 250-seat Waxlax and for only 10 evening performances (plus 6 matinees, including this weekend) is a loss for all who have to miss it.
Even if the public clamored for more, the run can’t be extended. In an irony worthy of Chekhov, the Waxlax has to be cleared out for Riverside’s annual Benefit Gala, slated for the Monday before opening night of “Hello, Dolly!” March 8.
Existential? Absolutely. Without fundraisers, no show would go on.
“Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” plays through Sunday afternoon.
