"Sweetest Vanya, dearest Sonia, " Masha says to them when she arrives, looking great, of course.
", David Hyde Pierce from "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" and Tom Sturridge from "Orphans.
Maybe a sterling comedy, "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, " by Christopher Durang, will capture the mood?
" Nicholas Martin, director of "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.
Sigourney Weaver, a longtime collaborator with Durang, plays Masha with flamboyant overacting.
But Masha Bell, author of Understanding English Spelling, says reform of spelling needs to go further and alter the way words are written.
Time, it turns out, weighs just as heavily on Masha, the aging egotist, who swans in with Spike (the excellent Billy Magnussen), an imbecilic Adonis.
Masha Gessen is chief correspondent at the Russian news weekly Itogi.
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" Kristine Nielsen of "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, " Holland Taylor in her one-woman show, "Ann, " and Cicely Tyson in "The Trip to Bountiful.
Jane is an expert on the novels of the (fictitious) 19th century Russian writer and cad, Grigory Karkov, and also on the diaries of his tormented wife, Masha.
Masha's arrival unsettles the stifling life of Vanya and Sonia.
"The ambition is to create a space for the kind of discussion that has been lacking in the Russian language, well, forever, " says Masha Gessen, Snob's deputy editor in chief.
The sibling who escaped, Masha, has become an insufferable movie star and has returned to sell the house, leaving her sister and brother with the prospect of being homeless and penniless.
Rounding up the cast is Masha's boy-toy Spike (a splendidly buoyant Billy Magnussen), a housekeeper convinced she can see the future (a very game Shalita Grant) and an ethereal neighbor (the fairy-ish Genevieve Angelson).
That's typical of the things flipped around in the playwright's utterly refreshing farce "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, " which happily has made the leap from off-Broadway to open Thursday at the Golden Theatre.
Masha, whom Weaver calls a "great peacock of a person, " needs to be taken down a few pegs and it finally happens, with Weaver slowly coming to the realization that her fussy Hollywood queen act can't last forever.
As the story unfolds, Jane struggles with the demands of being on both the mommy track and the tenure track, as well as with the sense that her seemingly emancipated life has some queasy similarities to Masha's wifely serfdom.
Russian commentator Masha Lipman of the Carnegie Moscow Centre shares the scepticism of many: "I think the best we can hope for is that there is some chemistry or some little glimpse of building trust for the future, " she told me.
Perhaps only a friendship and collaboration that has lasted more than 40 years could result in Weaver happily playing Masha these days in the brilliant "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" on Broadway, a play likely to score at least a few Tony Award nominations next week.
"The Last Station" was adapted from the novel by Jay Parini, and its structure is fairly intricate parallel love stories (Tolstoy and Sofya, Valentin and Masha), plus interlocking triangles (Sofya and Chertkov contending for Tolstoy's soul, Sofya and Chertkov pumping Valentin for information about one another's grip on Tolstoy's property).
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The resigned Vanya (David Hyde Pierce) and his bipolar adopted sister, Sonia (Kristine Nielsen), have been rusticated in this backwater, first looking after their dying parents, and now living together, without work or purpose, while a third sibling, Masha (the droll Sigourney Weaver), a famous actress, supports them from afar.
Three old hands, however, wrote thoroughly impressive new plays that were all done off-Broadway: John Patrick Shanley's "Storefront Church" opened at the Atlantic Theater Company, Christopher Durang's "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike " came to Lincoln Center Theater, and Terrence McNally's "Golden Age" was presented in the Manhattan Theatre Club's downstairs space at City Center.
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