Review: VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE at Solvang Festival Theater

On stage at Solvang's Festival Theater, PCPA presents the comic play Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. The title, a list of the Russian names of the main characters, suggests that it parodies the works of the great Naturalist playwright, Anton Chekhov, author of Uncle Vanya, The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard. The very American-sounding name "Spike" in the title tips us off to the oddball comic spin that writer Christopher Durang adds to Chekhov's melancholic themes.

When the play begins, the audience is afforded a view into the ancestral home of Vanya (Peter S. Hadres), and his adopted sister, Sonia (Anne Guynn) and into their dysfunctional family dynamic. Both Sonia and Vanya are "in mourning for their lives." Sonia has spent her youth caring for her parents while neglecting herself. Vanya harbors unrealized aspirations as an Avante-Garde playwright. As they pine for the lives they've wasted, their zany housekeeper, Cassandra (Annali Fuchs-Wackowski) makes ominous and non-sensical predictions about their future. When their sister Masha (Polly Firestone Walker), a famous actress, comes for a visit with her exhibitionist, gym-sculpted, younger boyfriend, Spike (Sam Bravo, soliciting some of the night's biggest laughs), Cassandra's premonitions of doom seem to be coming true.

In this production, director Mark Booher has crafted an emotional arch that maximizes the play's poignancy. In a comic parody such as this one, the cast could easily have neglected their feelings and played the laughs. Anne Guynn, however, manages to elicit our compassion for the long-suffering and self-pitying Sonia. And Masha, a deliberately unlikeable character, evolves convincingly as a human being in a deft portrayal by Polly Firestone Walker. I was expecting PCPA to find the all the humor in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. The pangs of empathy were an unforeseen delight.