Currently playing at the Repertory Theatre of Saint Louis, on the campus of Webster University (in other words, in Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis, not the city itself - but 3CM digresses, as usual) is the final main stage production of the season, Christopher Durang's Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. Self saw it earlier this week, on one of the preview nights. The title tells you that Durang has done a riff on the plays of Anton Chekhov, with clearly an American twist, as evidenced by the one name among the 4 in the title that doesn't really go with the others.
I'm not that knowledgeable about Durang's plays, nor am I all that familiar with Chekhov's work, even though I read a volume of AC's plays some time back and have seen one of his plays live. In fact, 3CM has now seen just as many Durang plays as Chekhov plays. So what of this production? More, sort of, below the flip (once you've read the synopsis, of course....hmmm... )....
First thing to say is that the set, a mildly run-down and long lived-in Bucks County, PA farmhouse, looks quite impressive. The actors are, overall, OK, although the actress playing Sonia, Suzanne Grodner, sounds a bit stiff and forced in the role. I understand that Sonia is someone who's never gone out into the world and made a life for herself, and is rather frumpy and unhappy. Yet it's perfectly possible to play such a character without sounding mannered and artificial, which is not the case here. Interestingly, however, when Sonia is later dressed up for the neighbors' party to which her sister (by adoption) Masha had been invited (so that Sonia and her brother Vanya get to go, by proxy invitation), Sonia, or the actress playing her, seems more into the role, perhaps because in costume, Sonia is channeling the Maggie Smith character from the 1978 film of California Suite (full disclosure; I've never seen the film, and have no idea what it's about, besides hearing the references to it in Durang's play), and thus the actress/Sonia is more comfortable "acting" as someone else.
In fact, I guess you could argue that the whole play is filled with more than slightly artificial characters, starting from 3 Americans in a family named for characters in Chekhov plays, although the name "Sonia" isn't that much of a stretch. Even the star-struck young visitor, Nina, who's a fan of the B-movie star sibling Masha, has a name that's not too far of a stretch. In a more self-revealing sense, speaking of the artificiality of plays, Nina is a very young thing who's very much into the films of Ingmar Bergman, rattling off the Swedish actors' names in the 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night, and having the Beatles on her iPod, even though the play is nominally set in the present. Says something that someone close to 3CM's dream girl only exists in a play, it would seem.
Since the play is set in the present, Durang manages to incorporate global warming / climate change, via Vanya and a play (within this play) that he's written, nominally from the point of view of a molecule (3CM is not making this up) in the universe, looking back at the now dead earth, after we effed it up big time. Though clearly the play-within-the-play is meant to be bad and a bit of a parody of political correctness with respect to global climate change, Durang is clearly not in the idiot Ted Cruz camp of climate change deniers, but is more in the reality-based side of the global climate change camp.
One way in which Durang deviates from Chekhov is noted in the Rep's on-line study guide for the play, which mentions that Durang gives his characters somewhat happier fates than Chekhov gave to his characters. If you know Chekhov's plays to any extent, you know that they're populated by characters who are unhappy with their lives, but don't do a lot to change them and get out of their ruts. (Yes, 3CM does resemble that remark - loser, he.) Where Durang gives a modicum of hope is that he allows his characters a bit of leeway to try to change, if just a little bit, more than Chekhov allowed his characters to do. For example, Vanya had kept that play with the molecule in the drawer, not for anyone else to see. Nina ends up persuading Vanya to take the play out of the drawer and give it a reading to others. BTW, FWIW, any possibility of a May-December relationship is scotched by the fact that Durang's Vanya is gay (like Durang himself), even though Nina, or the actress playing her, Gracyn Mix, is a lissome blonde.
Likewise, Sonia gets a chance to step out of her shell, which I won't spoil here, except to say that there's a moment when she might just so easily sink back into the same old stasis, but again, you would have to see a production or read the play to see what happens there. Even Masha, who's sort of a stand-in for Serebryakov from Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, i.e. the absent relative who actually owns the house and wants to sell it, as well as having a younger lover, achieves some degree of redemption by the end, unlike Serebryakov, who's a jerk throughout the Chekhov play and stays that way, and never suffers anything for being a jerk (too much like real life, unfortunately, as we can all see with respect to a newly re-elected Prime Minister of Israel). As Durang puts it:
"The play, I do want to say, is a comedy - in an American way. Some of it ends up a little better than you might think for Chekhov. Now that I’m older, I don’t like sending people home feeling too despairing, so, maybe for my own sake, I like to cheer things up a bit."
If you want to hear CD talk about the play, even if he doesn't necessarily explain it all for you, check
this out (for some reason, the "embed" setting doesn't work here). Plus, if nothing else, in this play, it's amusing to hear brief references to Bucks County and Montgomery County, the area where I grew up, in a play, not to mention, of all things, the Wawa convenience store chain.
So there you have it, a bit of a theatrical excursion, not up 3CM's usual street as such. With that, time for the standard SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories for the week.....