Chekhov insisted his plays were comedies. Indeed there are
very funny characters like Masha in THE SEAGULL who wears her depression like
an oversized Russian greatcoat that threatens to consume her whole. Yet the
overwhelming sadness of his characters’ wasted lives and crushed ambitions
seems so tragic (at least it does to us Americans-maybe not to Russians)—and, surprise, surprise, it turns
out, it’s so ripe for parody.
Playwrights are lining up left and right to borrow Chekhov’s
characters for their spoofs. This last season I saw three untouched (up) Chekhov
productions and two out and out spoofs. Aaron Posner’s STUPID F***ING BIRD
lifted THE SEAGULL to hilarious heights at the Apollinaire Theatre last season and
now Christopher Durang’s Tony winning VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE
(at the Huntington Theatre through Feb. 1st) crams that SEAGULL, THE
CHERRY ORCHARD, UNCLE VANYA and those THREE SISTERS, not to mention a refugee
from THE ORESTEIA into one outrageous send-up.
The poor creatures: Durang takes no prisoners with his
guerrilla style of comedy: He keeps you laughing so hard at the sheer absurdity
of the mash-up that you’re not thinking very deeply about the play. In fact,
the structure of the piece works its way sideways at best. Durang embraces the
set-up and the knock down of physical comedy but he interrupts the form with an
extended bit of phone business à la Bob Newhart and a soliloquy right out of Seinfeld’s
stand-up routines. Mind you, it all works because it is amusing, just not very
weighty.
Half the battle is finding comic actors who can make the
wacky dialogue fly. Director Jessica Stone has a game cast with several
standouts. Marcia DeBonis has the advantage of playing a three dimensional
character, someone we can care about, where the rest of the characters are
there to put over the comedy, not that DeBonis isn’t a master comedienne.
Sonia laments that she’s fifty-two and hasn’t had a date in
decades. If that’s not pathetic enough, she may have to leave behind her clump
of ten cherry trees (which she of course calls her “orchard”). The audience
adored DeBonis’ sad sack, “incipient bipolar” sister, so much so that they
gasped when it looked like she would turn down an opportunity… and they cheered
when she reconsidered.
Haneefah Wood hits her dialogue out of the park as the
prophetess/housekeeper named Cassandra (because it’s quite delicious to foresee
the future, have no one believe you, and be vindicated in seconds flat). She
celebrates her prescient gifts with a whoop and a triumphant semi-backbend that
kept us in stitches…no matter how many times she did it.
Martin Moran adroitly delivers the rambling paean to the
postage stamp and to our “shared national past” (before electronic devices
destroyed it). It’s the money shot in the play and the scene which brought home
the Tony.
