UNQUIET DESPERATION IN BUCKS COUNTY
He’s no longer an angry young playwright and gay avenger, the bad-boy Jeremiah who unleashed scorched-earth provocations (Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You and Beyond Therapy). The sexagenarian Christopher Durang has momentously mellowed. A take-no-prisoners satirist has softened into a surprisingly kind-hearted and compassionate chronicler of foibles. As the first three names in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike imply, this domestic tragicomedy is mostly homage to Chekhov–but “Spike” warns you it’s an American update.
Russia’s “good doctor” has managed to domesticate America’s splenetic jester. A feel-good drama about feeling awful, this 155-minute comic consolation is Goodman Theatre’s official summer fluff. Steve Scott’s Chicago premiere takes the silly stuff seriously enough to make it matter. What works is how naturally a usually dyspeptic dramatist embraces the wistful melancholia of the Russian master’s driven or paralyzed dreamers. Durang cleverly finds artful American equivalents for Chekhov’s quirks. Here too self-delusion beats truth-telling–signaled by pregnant pauses, vaporous longings, solo breakdowns, and dotty eccentricities. (This is not Stupid Fucking Bird where the jokes are on Chekhov rather than with him.) The plot teems with parallels to Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters, and especially The Seagull. But, very unlike Chekhov, there’s a happy ending or at least reconciliation. American hope wins over Slavic despair.
Charlie Corcoran’s immense set presents a ramshackle farmhouse now incongruously engulfed by a fashionable neighborhood. Here two forlorn, housebound, middle-aged siblings sip their morning coffee and await a blue heron to settle across a golden pond. Spunky gay Vanya (a deadpan Ross Lehman) and his elaborately depressed adopted sister Sonia (a radiantly lurching Janet Ulrich Brooks) are festering in this dilapidated cottage. The parents they cared for until the end have expired, leaving them to marinate in regrets. A moth who pines to be a social butterfly, Sonia (“I’m a wild turkey!”) is, of course, in mourning for her life. Vanya is a frustrated author who penned a secret surreal play much like Constantine’s eulogy for earth in The Seagull. Their cleaning lady/conjure woman Cassandra (ebullient E. Faye Butler) stops by to say some sooths about imminent disaster. (Durang is not above injecting a one-woman Greek chorus into his mashup.)
Right on cue the recluses’ sullen status quo gets disrupted. Shaking up their torpor is the arrival of wandering sister Masha Hardwick (Mary Beth Fisher, emoting on all cylinders). This self-absorbed starlet specializes in serial killers: Her weakest role is playing herself. Single again after five failed marriages, this clone of glamorous and miserly Madame Ranevskaya has brought along her boy-toy beauty Spike (suitably hunky Jordan Brown). The 29-year-old flake sports a killer bod, a peabrain and a Mayfly mentality. (The budding B-actor wasn’t even good enough to feature in a remake of Entourage.) He thinks he finds a kindred soul in young, impressionable next-door Nina (a charmingly unforced Rebecca Buller). This incites Masha’s ready self-pity and combustible jealousy. It only worsens affairs that Nina is Masha’s biggest fan.
Of course, Durang concocts some action to stir up the stereotypes, just as Chekhov discovered pathos in passivity. Masha has come by, not just to sell the family home and paltry cherry orchard that she’s sick of subsidizing (in effect throwing her kin onto the streets). No, she wants to flaunt her fame at a costume soiree in a nearby manse once occupied by Dorothy Parker. She will play Snow White, the others reduced to a supporting cast of dwarves. But Sonia, who’d rather be the beautiful witch with the talking mirror, manages to steal focus from her sybaritic sister. Deftly impersonating Maggie Smith, this former dishrag discovers a future follower. (Their telephone meet-up is beyond winsome.) Indeed nothing here goes Masha’s selfish way: It’s just as well since her humanity requires some strategic humiliation (and a bit of voodoo torture).
If the first act springs a therapeutic party on Durang’s denizens, the second act features a modern version of Constantine’s first-act staged reading. Here it’s Vanya’s bittersweet farewell to the future Earth that we destroyed, intoned by a lyrical Nina (playing a molecule) and a dogged Cassandra. But it’s just a foil for Durang’s tour de rage, Vanya’s sudden denunciation of the techno-shallowness of modern life. A baby boomer’s laundry list of nostalgia for the supposed “togetherness” of the Eisenhower Era, the screed is both invigorating and doomed.
The not-so-sad ending is pat and easily achieved. But what precedes it is Durang at his most unexpectedly understanding. Given Scott’s skilled sextet, V&S&M&S is truer to Chekhov’s bedrock honesty than to Durang’s showy parody. The author lets his creations shine even (or especially) in sorrow. Goodman Theatre’s merry gift to the script is to let no sidesplitting misery go unmocked. But then we’re all just molecules that chortle at the familiar failings of other molecules–so it doesn’t matter if we never get to Moscow.
photos by Liz Lauren
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike
Goodman Theatre
Albert Theatre, 170 North Dearborn
scheduled to end on July 26, 2015EXTENDED to August 2, 2015
for tickets, call 312.443.3800
or visit www.GoodmanTheatre.org
for info on more Chicago Theater,
visit www.TheatreinChicago.com
