Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike: A Kinder, Gentler Christopher Durang

 

I hadn’t seen a play for more than three weeks! Can you imagine?? I was starting to get the shakes. So, Wednesday, we headed to Portland Center Stage to see Christopher Durang’s 2013 Tony-award winning play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.

Both my Chekov education and my Christopher Durang education are relatively incomplete. I’ve seen The Seagull and Uncle Vanya (both on Broadway — Uncle Vanya was part of the Lincoln Center Theatre Festival and starred Cate Blanchett…WOW), and I have twice unsuccessfully attempted to see The Cherry Orchard. Other than that, I’ve had a book of Chekov’s plays by my bedside for a few weeks. I was supposed to read it before seeing V&S&M&S, but that didn’t really work out.

For Durang, I saw Sex and Longing during its ill-fated five-week run on Broadway in 1996. The critics hated it! I have to admit, I didn’t mind it — I was young and it was very edgy and had Sigourney Weaver. A third of the audience walked out during the first intermission and another third during the second, so the talk in the bathroom line was pretty interesting. I also saw Betty’s Summer Vacation at Defunkt last season. Compared to those two, V&S&M&S is a much kinder, gentler experience. At least no one gets his head cut off!

The show is funny. I highly recommend seeing anything with Sharonlee McLean in the cast. I loved her in The Typographer’s Dream, and her Maggie Smith voice is definitely a highlight of this production. From here on out, though, every time I see her I will be waiting in anticipation for her to shatter a drinking vessel.

For me, V&S&M&S was all about shared experiences that connect us to one another, and how not having shared experiences can make us feel lonely. The whole show builds up to Vanya’s tirade about the lack of shared experiences in modern culture, but the play shows us that even being in the same house doesn’t guarantee a shared experience, while sometimes wonderful connections come from where you least expect them. The play is sad, but also incredibly hopeful. And funny…don’t forget funny. It is Christopher Durang, after all.

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike runs through February 8. Also, next weekend, Portland Center Stage is having a Chekov workshop, so if your Chekov education is as deficient as mine, here’s your chance to learn something new (yes, I’ll be there).

 

What Are You? Exploring Identity at PCS’s “The Typographer’s Dream”

A few months ago, I was talking to my mother and I must have mumbled something strangely because all of a sudden she turned to me wide-eyed and exclaimed “What are you?” It made me laugh at the time, because it made no sense. But I found myself thinking differently about the incident last night watching Adam Bock’s The Typographer’s Dream at Portland Center Stage, as Annalise the Geographer, Margaret the Typographer, and Dave the Stenographer struggled to explain who they are through the veil of what they are, or more accurately what they do.

The Typographer’s Dream is presented as a sort of panel discussion (with a few asides), with Annalise (Laura Faye Smith), Margaret (Sharonlee McLean), and Dave (Kelsey Tyler) each there to discuss their jobs. The play is about identity — how we define ourselves, how we see ourselves versus how others see us, and how well (or how ill) we feel those definitions fit us. The characters are all both very passionate and somewhat disillusioned with their careers and, by extension, with themselves. They strive to explain what it is about their jobs that is so meaningful, what drew them to those careers in the first place. Annalise is always running out of the room for visual aids, Dave fixates on the act of typing, and when Margaret finally gets the room’s attention she has trouble figuring out what she wants to say. It’s funny, at times very funny, and also sad.

Smith, McLean, and Tyler are all excellent, creating characters that we can all identify with, even if we don’t want to admit it: Dave, with his willful blindness; Annalise, who can see everyone else’s problems so clearly; and Margaret, who just…wants…things…in…order. Until she can’t take it anymore and very slowly, very deliberately pushes a glass off of the table, freeing them all from the burden of keeping up appearances and allowing them to start exploring the who.

I loved how director Rose Riordan staged the show. The panel discussion format, with the lights up most of the time, means the audience plays a double role — as the audience for the play and as the audience for the panel. It was like we were there to learn about people and their jobs, and through that reflect about how our own jobs define us, whether we want them to or not. There were times when it got very personal, and I felt like I was eavesdropping on a moment or conversation I shouldn’t really have been seeing.

To me, The Typographer’s Dream was about learning to articulate that one thing that means everything to you, like the idea of pressing letters onto acid-free paper using high-quality ink. Even if it means nothing to anyone else. Even if it sounds silly when you say it aloud.

I started this blog to try to articulate my one small thing. What’s yours?