Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike's spirit is joyful

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      By Christopher Durang. Directed by Rachel Ditor. An Arts Club production at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage on Wednesday, March 25. Continues until April 19

      In this Arts Club production, Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike kept surprising me into laughter. That’s a gift and I’ll take it.

      Like the characters in many of Anton Chekhov’s plays, Vanya and Sonia live in luxurious rustic boredom but, instead of being outside Moscow just before the Russian Revolution, they’re outside New York City, right about now.

      Vanya and Sonia cared for their aging, demented parents while their glamorous movie-star sister, Masha, paid the bills. Mom and dad—university professors and community-theatre enthusiasts who named their kids after Chekhov characters—are now dead. Both in late middle age, Vanya and adopted, bitter Sonia have stayed in the family home, watching what’s left of their lives pass them by. Then Masha shows up, towing her boy toy, Spike, and announces that she’s selling the house. What, Sonia wonders, will happen to the cherry orchard?

      Unlike in Chekhov’s best-known works, the joys here are wacky and in your face. In The Seagull, the narcissism of the actress Arkadina slowly emerges. In Vanya, Masha announces, as soon as she arrives, that they’re all going to a costume party: Masha will be Snow White and her siblings will be dwarves. When Vanya mentions being gay, Masha replies, “I’m sorry, did we have some conversation I forgot?”

      For actors, filling this kind of scale is a big ask, and Jay Brazeau (Vanya) and Susinn McFarlen (Sonia) nail it. If you want to know what emotional commitment looks like on-stage, just wait till you see Brazeau’s Vanya staring at half-naked Spike like a toddler who’s just discovered television. And McFarlen’s combination of sincerity and irony works its wonders once again. McFarlen’s Sonia is despairing, but she never loses her humour, so we keep pulling for her, especially when she dresses as the evil queen from Snow White—as played by Maggie Smith on her way to the Oscars.

      I also flat-out loved Katey Hoffman’s work as Nina, the young neighbour, who, like her namesake from Chekhov’s The Seagull, is an aspiring actor. A lot of comedy is about dedication to illogic, and Hoffman’s Nina is furiously focused. When Masha, dressed as Snow White, asks Nina to identify who she is, and Nina guesses Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, the moment works largely because Nina really thinks she might be right. As Cassandra, the soothsaying, voodoo-practicing housecleaner, Carmen Aguirre also commits to Durang’s demands to excellent effect.

      While Anna Galvin is generally strong as Masha, she doesn’t always have the force to keep the character’s combination of toughness and vulnerability fully inflated. To be fair, I suspect that Masha is the hardest role, because of its complexity.

      Spike is also tricky, but for the opposite reason: he can be a one-note bimbo. Running around in his skivvies, Robert Salvador creates some strong comic business, but, too often, it feels like he’s working, as opposed to simply inhabiting the spirit of a clown.

      There were times, watching Durang’s play, when I wanted more to happen. And Vanya has a long speech at the end that, on one level, is garbled nostalgia for the ’50s; in a few years, the play’s references to the Davey Crockett TV series, and Ozzie and Harriet, will be indecipherable to most. The core of Vanya’s rant, his discomfort with increasingly alienating technology, speaks to our very specific cultural moment. But it’s about the genuine loss of human connection. That’s worth talking about, and I suspect Chekhov would have approved.

      Comments

      2 Comments

      Shelley Austin

      Mar 29, 2015 at 6:32pm

      I have read nothing but positive reviews of this show, but I have to say it wasn't up to my expectations. Perhaps it was because I had just seen Pacific Theatre's The Whipping Man the week before, as well as Trinity Western's The Drowsy Chaperone the night before. They rocked, and this didn't. Sadly, I can sum up the whole review of this play with one word: drivel. The acting was fine, it was their lack of content that was glaringly in question. I wouldn't recommend spending time watching this one.

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      Rtypos

      Apr 4, 2015 at 9:31pm

      I have to agree with you Shelley. I came very close to walking out on this play. I didn't think the second act could get worse than the first, but boy was I wrong. The self-indulgent monologue about how everything in the 50's was so much better than today was excruciatingly banal and ridiculously long. I don't understand the positive reviews or the Tony Award. Bad writing, boring dialogue and tedious characters who spend most of the time bemoaning their sad, unfulfilled lives. Ha ha.

      0 0Rating: 0