Some of the original cast of Christopher Durang’s Vanya, Sonia, Masha, and Spike brought this theater gem to life for the Theater at Lincoln Center gala this week, where the show began over a decade ago, before it made its logical move to Broadway’s Golden Theater winning a TONY award for Best Play. Now, taking over the Vivian Beaumont stage on a set designed for the current production of Uncle Vanya, this Chekhovian mash-up retains its brilliance, even gaining some according to Sigourney Weaver, reprising her role as Masha, a narcissistic actress returning to her ancestral home in Bucks County, PA, in time for a neighborhood costume party.
Whenever I am blue, I can snap out of it conjuring Sigourney Weaver’s image as Snow White. Act I is a sendup of Chekhovian tropes with prescient views on real estate and familiar philosophical exclamations like “I’m in mourning for my life!” In Durang’s whimsical mix master, here directed by Bartlett Sher with a scant three-day rehearsal time, the tragic—and neurotic-- circumstance of everyday life turns to high hilarity.
Weaver’s character, Masha, in fact a superstar action hero like Weaver herself (think Alien, Avatar), makes for a most vulnerable Snow White, too tall, her lips too thin, mistaken for Norma Desmond, BoPeep, a Meissen figure. Coming home to the house in which she was raised with her boy toy, Spike (Billy Magnussen in the original but in this production a fine David Hull); this cougar is at the cusp of keeping up the sexual acrobatics, humping him, while suffering this shallow hunk’s wanderlust.
For this production, Liesel Allen Yeager as Nina plays a charming neighbor who morphs nicely into Dopey as well as an “ethereal” molecule. And here’s the killer, none other than Linda Lavin was flown in to play Cassandra, a cleaning lady cum seer, with a unique way of “seeing:” who knew Lavin had these moves? “Beware of Hootie Pie,” she shrieks, sticking pins into a Snow White voodoo doll.
Kristine Nielson as whiny sister Sonia, the uh-less beautiful sister, refuses to attend the costume party as a dwarf and as the Evil Queen, channeling Maggie Smith going to the Oscars in a sequined evening gown. Christopher Durang wrote this part for her, said Nielson, knowing she could do the dame’s imitation. To see this play again is to miss the late writer who died in 2018 all the more. Meantime, she’ll be back to mincing herbs in the Russell’s kitchen for the third season of “The Gilded Age,” shooting this summer.
Keeping with the philosophical, what is a thrilling night at the theater? When you leave happier than when you came in. The exuberant crowd—with Candice Bergen, Robert Klein, Jane Houdyshell and many others including Steve Carell starring in the Uncle Vanya revival-- filed into David Geffen Hall for the most elegant short rib/ Bedell wine dinner.
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