Kanata Theatre scores high with Vania and Sonia and Masha and Spike
One of the pleasures of Kanata Theatre’s latest offering is its success in delivering a succession of plausible, fully-realized characters.
Furthermore director Jim Holmes and his cast are attentive to the nuances, both comic and wistful, of Christopher Durang’s amusing yet curiously heartfelt comedy, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.
To be sure, these characters inhabit their own, slightly skewed universe while also providing a conduit for Durang’s own wry reflections on the real world. What’s more, the plays of Anton Chekhov crop up as reference points in this 2012 script — even though you need to know nothing about his works to enjoy what’s happening on the stage of Kanata’s Ron Maslin Playhouse.
All of which points to the need for balance and cohesion in the rippling, modulating landscape of this play. In directing it, Holmes gives full rein to its explosions of outright zaniness, but the production also remains anchored to the truth that these are real human beings who are often — in true Chekhovian form — trapped in sad, unfulfilled lives.
It’s a measure of this production’s quality that it manages to engage us early on with a potentially static opening scene in which we meet two people seated in their country home awaiting a glimpse through their picture window of some blue herons. They’re middle-aged siblings — Vanya, who is quietly gay, and Sonia, who continues to be preoccupied with the fact that she was an adopted child. Both are discontented with life, although neither seems that capable of embracing its possibilities, and somewhat burdened by the fact that their culture-vulture parents named them after characters in Chekhov plays.
Two people sitting together having a morning conversation — a prescription for boredom? Possibly, but not here. Thanks to the quiet, rueful dignity of Bryan Morris’s performance as Vanya and the restless, slightly neurotic awareness of lost opportunities inherent in Chrissy Hollands’s portrayal of Sonia, these two lonely people do engage our attention
What’s also evident is that they’re getting on each other’s nerves. Hence, within this emotionally suppressed atmosphere, a squabble over morning coffee has the impact of an exploding grenade. Can this be happening in what seems to be a reassuring, perfectly groomed environment? It can. Indeed, designer Dean Flockton’s idyllically imagined farmhouse setting provides a gently ironic counterpoint to the turbulence in the lives of its inhabitants.
More turbulence ensues with the arrival of Masha, their worldly actress sister. Five times married, she’s now in the company of her new boy toy, a dim, muscle-flexing narcissist named Spike. Masha, as self-absorbed as she is skittish, is here because she’s been invited to a nearby costume party and plans to go there as Snow White — her scenario also includes dressing up her siblings as two of the dwarfs. Masha, capable of causing turmoil by her very presence, also has an announcement to make. As owner of the farmhouse home in which her siblings have lived for decades, she’s now proposing to sell it.
There are echoes of The Cherry Orchard here — indeed, Sonia immediately starts flapping about the fate of the very few cherry trees on this Pennsylvania property, a smattering that she would like to believe constitutes a real orchard. But we’re also getting garnishes of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya as processed through playwright Durang’s own anarchic sensibility.
“The play takes Chekhov characters and puts them through a blender,” Durang said a few years ago, and this is particularly true of the character of Masha. This is the most challenging role in the script, drawing on the personalities of both both that self-admiring humbug, Serebryakov, in Uncle Vanya and Irina Arkadina in The Seagull. In portraying Masha at Kanata, Kim Strauss is entrusted with evoking elements of two of the most irritating characters in the Chekhovian canon. She can scarcely be blamed for delivering an over-the-top performance when she’s playing an over-the top personality. The comic skills of this actress serve her well in portraying someone who is programmed to turn every action and every utterance into a drama. But it’s a characterization tinged with a fearful awareness of time’s passage and with it her fading career: there’s poignancy in her comic indecision about admitting to her true age.
Three additional performances make solid contributions to the mix. As Spike, Jordan Anger is successful in conveying the dopey, macho charm of Masha’s preening muscle-boy lover. Jillian Facchin makes the most of a worshipful innocent named Nina who falls under the roving eye of Spike. And Shirley Manh is an ongoing delight as Cassandra, a volatile cleaning lady who lives up to her name with her dire predictions of misfortune and calamity.
There are a number of solid set-piece moments. One comes when Manh’s Cassandra, driven to revenge by the disruptive presence of Masha, goes to work with a voodoo doll. Another comes when Bryan Morris, as Vanya, becomes the playwright’s megaphone and navigates his way through a treacherously long monologue bemoaning the death of culture: the fact that this is an outburst of moral passion from a distinctly ordinary man makes it all the more powerful. The speech still seems excessively long, but kudos to Morris for making it to the opposite shore without mishap.
Finally, there is that riveting moment when Sonya, a lonely woman who has given up all hope of a meaningful relationship, receives a telephone call asking her for a date. Chrissy Hollands — uncertain, indecisive, on the verge of once again destroying one of life’s possibilities — is outstanding in this scene.
Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike continues at Kanata Theatre to May 26.
Director: Jim Holmes
Set: Dean Flockton
Sound: Brooke Keneford
Lighting: Karl Wagner
Costumes: Martha Johnstone
Vanya: Bryan Morris
Sonia: Chrissy Hollands
Cassandra: Shirley Manh
Masha: Kim Strauss
Spike: Jordan Anger
Nina: Jillian Facchin