This play, now at the Camden Opera House will leave you thinking and chuckling for days.  Written by Christopher Durang, it's perfectly on target for what our local repertory group does best. It is  provacative, funny, and features a small, high-quality perfectly-cast bunch of characters. 

Snuggling into those comfy seats, you see the most splendid stage set you can imagine. As the stage lights rise, we gradually meet three siblings, living out the shadowy legacy of their patrician Chekov-obsessed parents.  

Vanya and Sonia have remained in the rambling family home, while Masha went off to a successful but unsatisfying movie career.     

We soon see that each sibling is stuck in their own particular dead-end.  Additional humor is provided by Masha’s  “boy toy” Spike, played exuberantly by Ryan Thompson.  Here is young Thompson, now acting with seasoned professionals, and brimming with confidence and pizzaz in an outrageous and risqué part which would inhibit many. 

The plot thickens with the proposed sale of the family home, and eventually our characters are headed to a costume party, fighting vigorously over costumes.  

And—oh, the art of the playwright! — it is in the choosing and wearing of a costume, and the role which goes with it, that each character gains perspective on their life, and glimpses the way forward.  

 For me, each character has a particular dramatic moment in the sun. After the party, Sonia is on the phone with “Joe” who is proposing a first date.   

In our hearing of this half-conversation, Jennifer Hodgson’s superb acting comes to the fore.  Likewise, David Troup’s Vanya is finding a new stride as a playwright, and gives an impassioned soliloquy you won’t forget.  

This tirade beautifully sums up the slow erosion of community which has separated us into “molecules” in these last decades.   

 And what could be a better spice to this rollicking play than the occasional intrusion of the sassy maid, played by Dagney Ernest?  She enlivens this downbeat, voodoo-weilding, disaster-cooking persona to a “T”.  Occasionally, she steps out of the set, to deliver a faux-Greek soliloquy loaded with modernisms.

I could go on, talking of Elizabeth Logun’s Masha’s believable softening, as her arrogance is eroded by Spike’s desertion, but really the best thing is to see this play.   Why go to plays?   Tillie Olsen, one of our most unusual writers, once said:  “I attended five colleges: Motherhood, human struggle, everyday work, literature, and contrast.”  Literature gives us an amplified and narrowed slice of life; and through it’s lens we  often see our own lives more clearly.

Jory Squibb lives in Camden.