Offensive? Chekh-ov… Funny? Chekh-ov…

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This article was published 12/02/2015 (4235 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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AMERICAN playwright Christopher Durang lives in the Pennsylvania countryside in a stone farmhouse overlooking a pond with a blue heron and a cluster of cherry trees.

Durang found the view very Chekhovian — although he never refers to the trees as a cherry orchard, which happens to be the title of one of the Russian playwright’s most famous works. Nonetheless, it got him thinking about what would happen if a covey of Chekhov characters lived in such a place.

It became the inspiration for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which blends 19th-century characters and themes into a 21st-century production about sibling rivalry set in rural Pennsylvania. The stage comedy, which starred David Hyde Pierce and Sigourney Weaver on Broadway, won Durang the 2013 Tony Award for Best Play. This season it is the most produced play in the United States with 27 regional theatre openings in addition to the one that begins Thursday, Feb. 12, at Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre.

 

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Durang, 66, is considered a modern master of black humour, best represented in full-length plays such as Sister Ignatius Explains It All To You, Beyond Therapy and his comedy about violence called Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. His 1974 absurdist piece Titanic was set on the famous ship —which wouldn’t sink, much to the chagrin of the passengers.

His idiosyncratic view of the world extends to his website, where entrance is gained by clicking on a photo of Swedish actress Liv Ullman having a nervous breakdown.

“One must guard oneself against the possibility of dying with laughter while watching a Durang play,” wrote Yale School of Drama professor Howard Stein in a preface to Christopher Durang: 27 Short Plays, a 1995 collection. “He has to be offensive to be effective, just as Aristophanes had to be offensive and Jonathan Swift had to be offensive.”

Vanya, Sonia and Masha are the aging children of college professors who named them after Chekhov characters. While Masha was off becoming a movie star, Vanya and Sonia stayed in the family’s house in Bucks County, caring for their mother and father. When their parents die, they are dissatisfied with what has become of their lives. Masha makes a surprise visit with a boy toy named Spike in tow.

“I had these names in my head and added Spike at the end so people would know the play was something about Chekhov and yet it was offbeat, too,” says Durang, during a telephone interview from his Buck County home. “People would laugh when I told them the title. There was something about Spike that didn’t belong.”

His real-life inspiration for Masha and the much younger Spike was the May-December romance of movie actors Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. There was even a line about them in the play, until they broke up and Durang promptly scratched it out.

The New Jersey-born Durang says that Vanya and Sonia is not about his life, but Canadian actress Fiona Reid, who plays sad Sonia, doesn’t agree.

“I think the play is very autobiographical; Vanya is very much Durang,” says Reid. “It’s about getting to a certain time in life and wondering about celebrity, whether theatre still matters to people and what celebrity has done to art. Masha is a movie star and Durang is a good friend of Sigourney Weaver, someone who could have been a classical actress but for fame and a series of hit movies.”

DURANG’S relationship with Chekhov started badly as a 14-year-old, when he gave up after reading a few pages of one of the plays. At Harvard, an English professor primed his appreciation for the Russian dramatist, who was the subject of last year’s Master Playwright Festival in Winnipeg.

“I really liked the sadness in Chekhov, because I was depressed at college,” he says.

Chekhov’s influence followed him to the Yale School of Drama, where he and fellow student playwright Albert Innaurato co-wrote The Idiots Karamazov, a loopy mashup of characters from Dostoevsky and Chekhov. Another student named Meryl Streep donned a grey wig and oversized nose to play an eccentric Russian literary translator.

He borrowed the Vanya line, “We’ll suffer through a long succession of tedious days, and tedious nights,” from Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and gave it to Sonia for his play.

“I very much identified with that line,” says Durang. “I’ve used that line in other plays of mine.”

Winning a Tony Award was something that Durang might have thought had passed him by. He hadn’t had a play on Broadway since 1982, when Beyond Therapy featured Dianne Wiest, John Lithgow and a cameo by Hyde Pierce, for which the Frasier actor earned his union card. So there was no reason to be thinking about Broadway when writing Vanya and Sonia.

From time to time, he wondered why his plays that were so appreciated by regional theatres but never considered right for Broadway. He had his doubts he would win a Tony, which sits in his kitchen.

“I was lucky the year I was nominated that there wasn’t some wonderful play about death, because plays about death often trumps comedies,” he says.

 

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca