Lincoln Center Theater, New York
(212) 239-6200
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Amid a recent wave of Chekhov revivals, “it’s a relief to meet a play that doesn’t take the master of Slavic despair too seriously,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. You’d think that Christopher Durang’s caustic sensibility would lead him to “identify with the hope-starved souls” that populate the works of Anton Chekhov. But the playwright’s latest, an antic pastiche of various Chekhov dramas, is his way of lovingly telling the gloomy Russian to lighten up. To be sure, the title characters, who’ve been relocated to modern-day Bucks County, Pa., are still as miserable as their 19th-century prototypes. But Durang eventually dispenses with ennui and angst altogether in favor of a surprisingly sunny conclusion.
The events leading to it include many detours, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. In this story, siblings Vanya (David Hyde Pierce) and Sonia (Kristine Nielsen) reside in their late parents’ farmhouse and make life monotonous by engaging in pointless airings of regret. Enter sister Masha (Sigourney Weaver) with her boy toy Spike (the uproarious Billy Magnussen) in tow. A famous actress, Masha “colonizes the environment with magnificent self-absorption,” and the play soon becomes “a very busy kettle of ideas”—though not all “brought to boil.” What the show lacks in coherence, however, it makes up for in “wry observational skills.”
Don’t overthink the Chekhov references, said Rex Reed in The New York Observer. Just enjoy Durang’s wit and the rollickingly good performances—from Weaver’s suave Masha to Nielsen’s “marvelous, cow-eyed” Sonia to Genevieve Angelson’s dewy Nina, a girl from next door. It is Pierce, however, who steals the show with an “impassioned, exhausting” speech about what’s wrong with the world today, “leaving the audience in tears of both laughter and philosophical agreement.” Durang has given Chekhov’s characters new life. Here, they’re not only intriguing; they’re also exhilarating.
-
If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
-
Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
-
Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
-
The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
-
Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
-
The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
-
No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
-
The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.