Stacey Logan’s Riverside Theatre debut this week in the part of a famous actress might not seem a stretch for her island neighbors – at least until her character Masha becomes a little clearer.
In Christopher Durang’s absurdist comedy “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” that opened Tuesday at Riverside, Masha is a movie star from L.A. who comes to visit her siblings in rural Bucks County, Penn., with her latest lover in tow. Five times wed and divorced, neurotically insecure and keenly competitive, Masha owns the home and pays the bills of the stay-at-home odd couple that is her gay brother Vanya and adopted sister Sonia. (Spike, of the non-Chekhov inspired name, is the much younger lover; he spends a substantial portion of the play in his underwear, Logan notes happily.)
It is probably safe to say that Logan doesn’t share much else with Masha but her profession. Furthermore, Logan is a veteran not of film but stage, including five Broadway musicals. Though her down-to-earth demeanor might belie it, she is a career New York-based actress who now performs regularly at regional theaters. Of late, she has performed regularly with Oklahoma City Repertory Theater – it’s her childhood hometown and she loves to go back and visit.
Logan also has a far different marital history than her character. She dated her husband Robert Lewis for 16 years before marrying him 12 years ago, and says the decision to wait was hers.
“I didn’t know his expectations, and I was afraid what he wanted was a woman who sits in her kitchen all day.”
Which is more or less what Vanya and Sonia do in Durang’s farce. Unemployed after taking care of their now-deceased parents, the two are living in their childhood home when Masha arrives and turns their world upside down.
Logan saw the play on Broadway – it won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2013 – and knew the role of Masha, then played by Sigourney Weaver, would be hers someday. “I saw it and said I have to do this play,” she says.
In the 2014-15 season, “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” was the most produced play in the country.
In one of those productions, at Oklahoma City’s City Rep, her vow to play Masha was finally fulfilled.
Oklahoma City proved an excellent training ground for Logan, who danced, sang and acted her way through childhood, adolescence and college.
Her mother, a receptionist, nurtured her daughter’s passions, taking her from the age of 4 to dance lessons, though she could hardly afford them. Logan was out of college before she learned that her mom had only just finished paying off the debt to the studio – at a deeply discounted $10 a month.
“They’d kept a tab,” says Logan. “And it should have been a lot more than that.”
If she wasn’t fully aware of the family finances, she certainly knew by her senior year that money for college would be short. So when a friend of hers won the Miss Oklahoma pageant and was crowned Miss America winning a $10,000 scholarship, Stacey jumped in. “I said, ‘I can do that.’ And I won the first one I did.”
At 17, Logan was crowned Miss Oklahoma USA.
By then she had already gotten her first paycheck as an actress. She was 15 when she was cast in a musical at Oklahoma’s Lyric Theater. But it was her talent playing the flute that got her a scholarship to the private Oklahoma City University. The university had an excellent musical theater program; she and Kristin Chenoweth had the same vocal teacher.
Logan graduated with a degree in vocal performance and got a three-month job singing on a cruise ship. With the $1500 she saved, she made her way to New York. She was there only four days when she went to her first audition, and got a union job as a tap-dancing soprano in the musical “George M.”
The day after the show closed, she headed out to tour with Anthony Newley in “Stop the World; I Want to Get Off!” Her next role was in Florida, at Jupiter Theatre’s 1991 production of “Born Yesterday” with Claude Akins.
Back in New York, she was waiting for a sequel to “Sugar Babies” to get off the ground, and decided on a whim to audition for the new Gershwin musical comedy “Crazy for You.” She won the part of Patsy, under the direction of the great Michael Orent. The show won Best Musical for 1992.
Logan went on to perform in four more Broadway shows. In 1994, she had a two-year run as Babette, the sexy French maid in “Beauty and the Beast.” Then in 1997, she was cast as Paquette under director Hal Prince in Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” at the Gershwin Theatre. In 1998, she was standby for Tracy Samantha Lord in “High Society.” And she played Rita in the 2002 stage version of “Sweet Smell of Success.”
Through it all, she was spending her downtime with her husband in Vero Beach, having bought a home in Baytree in 1988. After the 2004 hurricanes, the couple moved to Windsor, where they now live.
Logan has been a witness to the evolution of the small-town Riverside Theater, from almost all-volunteer in the 1980s to all-professional today, one of the largest regional producing theaters in the state.
In 2013, she did perform at Riverside, but in a benefit, not a professionally-produced play. Logan read the one-woman monologue written by Susan Yankowitz, “The Thumbprint of Mukhtar Mar.” It is part of a larger documentary work called “Seven” that toured the world in 2006, and was once directed by Julie Taymor. The subject matter was uncharacteristically weighty for Logan: an illiterate Pakistani girl who is the victim of a gang rape.
Yankowitz was the college roommate of the event organizer, Cynthia Bardes, a big supporter of Riverside. Bardes is a neighbor of Logan’s in Windsor.
Riverside’s Allen Cornell coached Logan in the monologue. Well before that, he knew of her: She had sent him a postcard announcement in 1999 when PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre” aired a Papermill Playhouse production of “Crazy for You,” starring Logan in the lead role of Polly.
That production was directed by Riverside veteran director Jimmy Brennan; he starred in “Crazy for You” on Broadway and is close friends with Logan.
Brennan is directing Logan here in “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.”
Though she performed the same role last year, the lines have proved challenging all over again, written as a mash-up of the works of the great Russian playwright Chekhov’s best-known works.
“It’s almost like it’s translated from Russian,” says Logan, who read her part into the voice memo app on her iPhone so she could listen to it wherever she was.
“The language is like popcorn. The syntax of his sentences is so quirky, it’s hard to memorize. It’s much more difficult than you would think.”
Logan has to be elegant and glamorous, but also “maniacally selfish,” she says. One particular scene in which she brags incessantly about herself was particularly challenging.
“It’s just really wordy and there are these quick, bubbling changes of thought,” says Logan. “That’s a hard scene, and you have to be keyed in with your brain full on. You can’t drop the ball.”
“She is perfect for the role of Masha,” says Cornell. “It not only showcases her talent, but it’s a great introduction to our audiences.”
“Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” plays on Riverside’s intimate Waxlax Stage through Feb. 28.
