Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike

B Street Theatre brings company members to the forefront with the regional premiere of Christopher Durang’s Tony Award-winning Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. It’s a very funny and often insightful skewering of family relations, contemporary self-absorption, and the loss of real connections to each other and the world.

As the title suggests, the play features a check off of Chekhov, with shout-outs to works like Uncle Vanya (on which the play is very loosely based), Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull and The Bear. For literary nerds, this is one laugh after another.

For those who are less familiar with Chekhov’s work, though, there’s still plenty to laugh at—including the disruption by a young man sending text messages during the staged reading of a play.

Greg Alexander (Vanya) and Stephanie McVay (Sonia) bring a quiet desperation to the siblings who stayed behind in the family’s Bucks County, Pa. home to care for their aged parents. Jamie Jones (Masha) is sufficiently self-involved and dramatic as their successful actress sister, who owns the house and is now returning to sell it. She brings with her a boy toy: the vacuous and beautiful Spike (Jason Kuykendall, in a role that lets him show off his well-toned body), who is easily distracted by Nina (Mary Katherine Cobb), the would-be actress and visiting neighbor. Throw in Cassandra (Tara Sissom), a housekeeper with a bent for both prophecy and voodoo, and things are bound to get a bit crazy.

Directed by Buck Busfield, the play has all the elements of a good satire, but at times seems more concerned with farce than with really skewering the subjects broached. Still, it’s hard not to laugh at the site of Masha, dressed as the Disney version of Snow White, alternately raging, sobbing and flirting. Sometimes absurdity really is enough.