Ella (Rána Roman, seated) and Pickles (Marcella Kearns) are part of the bickering extended family adapted from Chekhov.
The internet is full of short, funny plot descriptions for classic books. Moby Dick is “Man versus whale. Whale wins.” Don Quixote: “Guy fights windmills. Also, he’s crazy.” For The Grapes of Wrath, there’s “Farming sucks. Road trip! Road trip also sucks.”
But don’t bother looking up an on-the-nose assessment of Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya. Award-winning playwright Aaron Posner has already beaten you to it. Life Sucks, his homage to the classic Russian work, riffs on its characters and themes while bringing them decidedly, and sometimes irreverently, onto the modern stage. Forward Theater’s excellent production of Life Sucks, running in the Playhouse at Overture Center through April 14, is a funny, contemplative, tragic, ridiculous and insightful take on the sad-sack antihero Uncle Vanya (William Bolz) and his loosely related family group, most of whom live on the edge of despair.
As the actors tell the audience directly in the first scene, this is a play about love, longing, loss, not getting what you want, and grappling with how screwed up the world is. They also warn that if you aren’t interested in the intellectual and emotional pathos that is to follow, then you “may have chosen your night’s entertainment badly.” That’s fair. But seriously, don’t leave your seats. These characters — with their desires, flaws, blind spots and small comforts — are people you should meet.
Brian Mani’s tweed-clad Professor is the mostly absent owner of this rural estate, which could easily be a vacation property in Door County. He and his third wife, the much younger and stunningly attractive Ella (a chicly dressed Rána Roman), have dropped by to check up on the house and the collection of misfits who live there, including his plain, kind daughter Sonia (Elyse Edelman), the aggressively quirky, broken-hearted lesbian nicknamed Pickles (a pig-tailed, ukulele-strumming Marella Kearns), and the easy-going ceramic artist Babs (Sarah Day), a family friend who moved in after the Professor’s first wife died of cancer, when Sonia was very young. Dr. Aster (an affable Reese Madigan) also visits frequently. A middle-aged neighbor and childhood friend of Vanya’s, he works too much, drinks too much, and works out too much. He, like the others, is often lonely and alone.
Over the course of four acts, these characters complain and bicker with one another, taking breaks only to refill their cocktail glasses, sing snippets of bouncy Beatles songs, and long for things to be different. Each scene’s title is on a calendar that hangs on one of the incomplete walls of the home and as each month is flipped, the actors and the audience jointly know what we’re in for next.
The all-star cast revels in their grumpiness. Boltz’s Vanya takes jabs at the Professor with the bitter mumblings of a sore loser. The Professor makes a show of swatting at gnats whenever his host starts to whine.
Meanwhile, the hapless doctor pursues Ella, the bored trophy wife, by discussing the planet’s impending doom. His speech bores her to tears, while sending Edelman’s Sonia into hilarious fits, since she pines for him, completely unacknowledged. Her last desperate attempt to get his attention is operatic, as is her chagrin when he walks off, completely unmoved. The actors really shine in monologues, many of them in conversation with the audience. Ella shares her indignation about how often her lovely physical features interfere with her ability to have a normal friendship with other people. The Professor’s diatribe on the indignities of getting older, slower and heavier is also sublime. And brokenhearted Pickles’ recitation on love is poignant and true.
Meanwhile, Babs reclines casually in an Adirondack chair, sipping vodka, and withholding judgement as much as she can. The only one with real agency or peace of mind, her monologue about gratitude is a beautiful meditation on mindfulness.
Jennifer Uphoff Gray’s direction is understated — characters wander in and out of Mike Lawler’s creative set, which gives them plenty of places to sit and talk. Or moan. Or cry.
A relentless blue sky, filling the entire back wall, shines through the missing building blocks of a deconstructed house. And beside the house there is a cherry tree, bursting with the spectacular pink blooms of late spring — that none of the self-absorbed, self-pitying, self-sabotaging characters can see.
