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by Christopher Durang, directed by Dean Paul Gibson

David Mirvish, Panasonic Theatre, Toronto

March 17-April 5, 2015

Vanya: “I hope you’re not going to make Chekhov references all day.”

The only reason to see Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, the extraordinarily vapid comedy now playing at the Panasonic Theatre, is to experience the absolutely wonderful performance of Fiona Reid.  V&S&M&S may have won the 2013 Tony Award for Best play, but as fewer and fewer non-musical plays are presented on Broadway, the award has become almost meaningless.  V&S&M&S is not even especially well written and its claims to profundity lies solely in its frequent allusions to the plays of Anton Chekhov, even though those allusions do not combine in meaning and present a clichéd view of the author.  Only two of the six characters are not stereotypes and Reid is fortunate to be playing the more well-rounded of the two.

The play begins well enough with typical early morning bickering of two middle-aged siblings, Vanya (Steven Sutcliffe) and Sonia (Fiona Reid).  Never married, never even in a relationship with anyone, the two feel that life has passed them by.  Fifteen years caring for their dying, demented parents used up their best years and now the two live in the family home on sufferance of their movie star sister Masha (Jennifer Dale), who pays the mortgage and gives them a stipend.  This portion of the play is well-observed in showing how mutual frustration with a meaningless life can cause minor events to blow up to major proportions. 

Vanya, Sonia and Masha’s parents had both been academics enamoured of Chekhov and so gave their children names from Chekhov’s plays.  If only Durang had continued in this nuanced, low-key manner, his play might have served as a modern homage to the Russian master rather like Brian Friel’s Afterplay (2002), in which Sonya and Andrey, characters from two different Chekhov plays, happen to meet in Moscow. 

Unfortunately, this does not happen.  The next character Durang introduces is the siblings’ black cleaning lady Cassandra (Audrey Dwyer), named after the character in Greek tragedy.  Cassandra, with her psychic powers, falls in line with the new stereotype that black film director Spike Lee has decried as the “Magical Negro”, a black person with supernatural powers who comes to the aid of white people.  Not only is the presence of such a stereotype embarrassing, but Durang has made her so strident she comes across as some sort of cartoon figure. 

Cassandra’s arrival filled with cryptic warnings sets the stage for the arrival of two more stereotypes.  Masha, the movie star cougar, arrives with her dimwitted boy toy Spike (Luke Humphrey).  Durang makes Masha’s self-absorption so extreme it makes Joan Collins in TV’s old evening soap Dynasty look subtle.  Spike is equally self-obsessed, particularly with looking “sexy” which causes him to strip to his underpants at the slightest provocation.  With the introduction of three caricatures in a row, the play gives up any attempt at homage and proceeds into firm sitcom territory complete with set-ups and punchlines, one-liners and exit lines.  A hope for a return to reality arrives when Spike brings back a girl Nina (Ellen Denny) from the neighbouring house, but by then her innocence serves only as a foil for the others’ extremes.

What little plot there is involves Masha attempting to get everyone to follow her instructions of what to wear to a costume ball being held that night at the house of someone important.  She is going as Disney’s Snow White and wants everyone else to go as supporting characters.  The mousy Sonia rebels at this and chooses to go as Maggie Smith in 1979 when she won an Oscar for California Suite.  The first act ends with Masha informing Sonia and Vanya that she intends to sell the house.

The play is filled with allusions to Chekhov – a cherry orchard, an egotistic actress who is never at home, a woman “mourning for her life” – but as many commentators have pointed out, it is possible to enjoy the play without any knowledge of Chekhov which basically means that Durang’s allusions are merely a mishmash of references without importance to the story.  Vanya is “possibly gay” in Durang but definitely not in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.  Just to confuse things, Durang has Vanya write a play modelled on Konstantin’s play in The Seagull.  Sonia is the plain, unmarried daughter of a professor in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, but she is Vanya’s niece, not his sister.  In Chekhov, Masha is the middle sister in Three Sisters who longs to return to Moscow, but Durang makes her much more like the actress Arkadina in The Seagull who is always away from home.  Cassandra and Spike have nothing to do with Chekhov – she coming from Greek tragedy, he from TV.  The one character who most closely resembles her counterpart in Chekhov is Nina, Konstantin’s love interest in The Seagull, who is filled with naive hope, wants to be an actress and plays the central role in the play within a play.  Durang has her refer frequently to her “name day”, which is a characteristic not of Nina but Irina in Three Sisters. 

What gives the lie to the notion that the play seriously engages in any way with Chekhov is its happy ending.  Three Sisters, The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard all conclude with a death and Uncle Vanya ends on a note that optimistically could be called bittersweet.  Durang’s ending that ties up everything in a tidy bundle and has everyone sing along to the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” couldn’t be farther removed from the Russian master.

Durang has succeeded in creating only one well-rounded character and that is Sonia, played to perfection by Fiona Reid.  She shows us a woman who has grown to middle age unloved and carries that sadness with her like a burden wherever she goes.  Depression, however, does not rule out wit, and Reid does hilariously accurate imitations of Maggie Smith circa 1979.  Smith may be the only imitation Sonia can do, but it is deliciously fun.  Reid’s Sonia is also the only one of the characters we remotely care about.  When Sonia gets an unexpected phone call that could possibly change her life, people in the audience were literally rooting for her out loud to say yes and stop her self-deprecation.

Steven Sutcliffe’s Vanya is the next closest to being a fully-fledged character.  Durang has Vanya mention that he is “possibly gay” but never follows this up and seems to exist as a remark only to get laughs when Spike flirts with him.  Otherwise, Sutcliffe radiates an inherently bitter view of life that only Nina’s youth seems to knock out of the doldrums.

Ellen Denny is well cast as the open-eyed Nina, who is so awed being in the presence of a great actor like Masha that she ignores all the woman’s faults.  She can see through Spike, however, since Durang gives her the one-liner, “He’s very attractive – except for his personality”.

The roles of Cassandra and Masha are written so over the top that there is little to do with them.  Both Audrey Dwyer and Jennifer Dale start so big they have nowhere to go.  It’s possible that associating Cassandra with voodoo and African magic is supposed to be funny because it’s so clichéd and in such bad taste, but I found it embarrassing to have a gifted actor like Dwyer forced to play such a caricature.  As for Dale, her one-note tone of superiority becomes tedious very quickly.  Luke Humphrey has actually acted before, but this role reduces him to a grinning slab of beefcake and he seems happy enough to comply.

Sue LePage has produced what is likely the most attractive set ever to grace the Panasonic stage and under Scott Henderson’s lighting is much more communicative of mood and atmosphere than anything Durang conjures up in words.  The play is a simply a paper thin joke that wears even thinner as the evening goes on.  The depth of the play is the extraordinarily long diatribe Durang gives Vanya against modern youth and their electronic devices versus the supposedly superior values of the 1950s when people could share the communal values of such icons of Daniel Boone or Ozzie and Harriet.  Like the play itself, Vanya’s monologue is both intentionally and unintentionally embarrassing, the speech’s sheer length suggesting that Durang, once thought avant garde, now feels free to unleash his inner old fogey on the world.  V&S&M&S represents a clear decline in Durang’s powers and it’s incomprehensible that the play should have won any award except out of pity for a lost talent.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Steven Sutcliffe, Fiona Reid, Jennifer Dale and Luke Humphrey; Ellen Denny, Jennifer Dale, Luke Humphrey, Fiona Reid and Steven Sutcliffe. ©2015 Jeremie Andrew.

For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.