For The Love of Vanya …

“Being alive is kissing a tree going 293 miles-per-hour through a windshield and then waking up to take your first baby steps again.” If you desperately wanted to try the cake of life, but a pompous, greedy old fool barged in and took the last slice for himself, is that his fault, or yours? Does life owe you some cake, or have you just wasted your time waiting - until one day the cake is all gone? This play isn't actually about a wasted cake, but it is about wasted life and the feeling that you've lost something without ever really having it. It is about reclaiming that feeling of being alive. Stuck in a country house during the break-out of a pandemic, a family is consumed by lethargy, boredom, and regret, and so they begin to act in bizarre and chaotic ways. It is the year 2020. The Patriarch of the house is famous artist Alexander Serebrakoff, a man who is both brilliant and a few sticks short of a basket. He is plagued both by angina of the heart and by what is much, much, ohhh so much worse, the boredom of the countryside. Everyone in the house, including his wife, Helena, his daughter, Sonya, Marina, an elderly auntie, a gardener called Plooky [on account of his pock-marked face] and Madam Maria, his step-mother, must care for him and endure his lamenting babble until perhaps one day he kicks the bucket, or the day finally comes when the quarantine lock-down ends. No one perhaps has more reason to complain about Alexander's idiosyncrasy than Dr. Mikhail Astroff, a brooding and "sexy" doctor who has a most interesting personality which becomes the object of desire to some people throughout the play. No one acts more deranged or is more miserable than Ivan Petrovich Voynitski, step-brother to Alexander, known to all as "uncle Vanya." He is [according to himself, at least] the tragic and hilarious hero, who sets off a chain of events leading to scandalous affairs, murder attempts, and decade-old secrets spreading like wildfire. Ultimately, the strangeness and insanity of these events result in different disillusionments and resolutions for all the characters, but the ending is not an apparently happy one.