Christopher Durang’s theatrical specialty is a kind of gleeful comedian exaggeration that falls somewhere between farce and satire,between mischief and mayhem, in that territory that Chekhov referred to as “vaudeville.” Durang is an equal-opportunity lampooner; he has sent up Russian literature (“The Idiots Karamazov”), or the Brecht-Weill collaboration (“Das Lusitania Songspiel”),the Catholic Church (“Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You”), dysfunctional families (“The Marriage of Bette and Boo”), or even Tennessee Williams (“For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls”). In his new play,“Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” (splendidly directed by Nicholas Martin, at Lincoln middle’s Mitzi E. Newhouse), and Durang has struck funny again. It’s as whether he had fallen asleep over the works of Anton Chekhov and woken up to find that the plots and tropes of the playwright’s iconic lost souls had migrated from the vastness of Russia to the bucolic tidiness of a Bucks County,Pennsylvania, farmhouse. “Man will become better when we gain shown him to himself as he is, and ” Chekhov noted. But Durang has disabused himself of any such idealism: the mirror that he holds up to nature is a fun-house mirror.
Source: newyorker.com