AUDITIONS

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike

by Christopher Durang

Winner of the 2013 Tony Award for Best Play

The Most Decorated Comedy of Its Season!

Christopher Durang's farmhouse farce did something almost no play manages: it swept the board. It collected every Best Play award of the 2012–13 season — the Tony, the Drama Desk, the Drama League, the New York Drama Critics' Circle, and the Outer Critics Circle — after earning six Tony nominations for its Broadway run at the Golden Theatre. The Off-Broadway production also took the Off-Broadway Alliance Award for Best Play.

The play opened on Broadway with Sigourney Weaver, David Hyde Pierce, and Kristine Nielsen leading a cast in which four of the six actors and the director all landed Tony nominations. Bloomberg News called it, simply, “the funniest play in town.”

Six actors. One set. Every single part a scene-stealer.

The Story

Vanya and Sonia have not left the house in fifteen years, and the house is in Bucks County, so it isn't even an interesting house. They are middle-aged, unemployed, and named after Chekhov characters, because their parents were community theater people who thought that was a wonderful thing to do to their three children. Their mornings are coffee, bickering about the coffee, and watching the pond for a heron that may not exist.

Then Masha arrives.

Masha is their sister. Masha is a movie star. Masha has five ex-husbands, a film franchise called Sexy Killer, and a twenty-something boyfriend named Spike whose greatest professional achievement is that he almost got cast in Entourage 2. She has come home for a costume party dressed as Snow White, would like Vanya and Sonia to attend as dwarves, and is thinking of selling the house.

Over one deranged weekend a housekeeper delivers doom-laden prophecies between loads of laundry, then resorts to voodoo; the girl next door reads the role of a molecule in Vanya's secret play; Sonia attends as the Evil Queen, by way of Maggie Smith at the Academy Awards, and comes home a different person; and

gentle Vanya finally erupts in a magnificent, wounded, ten-minute tirade about licked postage stamps, party-line telephones, and nobody watching anything together anymore.

It is very, very funny. And then, in the last ten minutes, it quietly breaks your heart — the trick Durang has been pulling for forty years.

Why You Want to Be in This Show

• Six leads. No spear-carriers. Everyone gets laughs. Everyone gets a moment that lands.

• Roles worth waiting for if you're over 45. Three of the six are in their 50s, and the writing for them is extraordinary. Comedy this good rarely comes with this much heart attached.

• You get to play big. Costumes, tantrums, prophecy, a shepherd's crook. Then you get to put it all down and be devastating.

• No singing, no dancing, one set. Just language and timing. Come as you are.

The Roles

VANYA — Male, plays 50s

Sweet-natured, dryly funny, and the family's designated absorber of everyone else's chaos. He has been quietly writing a play in a drawer for years and would rather watch the pond than confront anything. Then, in the second act, something snaps and he unleashes one of the great comic monologues in the modern American theater — a furious, hilarious, deeply sad elegy for a world that had four TV channels and everybody watching the same one. An actor's dream: nine-tenths restraint, one-tenth detonation.

SONIA — Female, plays early 50s

Aggrieved, dramatic, magnificently self-pitying, and capable of hurling a coffee cup across a room with real conviction. She has decided she is a wild turkey in a family of peacocks and would like you to know it. Then a costume and a borrowed accent give her permission to be someone else for one night — and later, a man named Joe telephones, and the scene that follows is the most fragile and beautiful thing in the play. Enormous laughs, then absolute stillness.

MASHA — Female, plays mid 50s

Star. Diva. Disaster. She sweeps in, redecorates everyone's emotional life, threatens to sell the family home, and reminds them all who pays the mortgage — and she is doing every bit of it because she is terrified of turning around and finding Spike gone. Needs an actor who can play enormous wattage and let the audience see the fear flickering behind it.

SPIKE — Male, plays 20s (29 or younger)

Masha's boy-toy. Devastatingly handsome, aggressively cheerful, and possessed of the inner life of a golden retriever. He texts during other peoples art, treats every room as an audition, and undresses at the slightest encouragement. A gift for a physically confident comic actor; the role does require performing in one's underwear.

NINA — Female, plays early 20s

The starstruck girl from next door who wants to be an actress and means it with her whole heart. Utterly sincere, utterly without irony, and thrilled to do a reading of  Vanya's play. She is also the only person who can coax Vanya and Sonia back towards being alive. Trickier than it looks — the sweetness has to be genuine or the whole character sours.

CASSANDRA — Any age, any race

Housekeeper and soothsayer. She grumbles about the dusting, then erupts into full Greek-oracle warnings that nobody heeds, then goes and does something about it with a voodoo doll and impressive results. A tremendous comic engine for a performer who can flip registers on a dime. The role was originated by an African-American actress in her 20s; open casting is encouraged.

Audition Details

To be firmed up Fall 2026; sign ups available soon.

Dates: Tentatively scheduled for January 15  and 16, 2027

Location: TBD

Director: Rick Anderson

Performances: April 2 - 18

Rehearsals Begin: Tentatively planned to start January 31 (table read, January 25)

What to bring: A one-minute comic monologue. Readings will be from the script.

All six roles are open, and we welcome actors who have never worked with us before. Please note for planning purposes: the script contains adult language and brief comic sexual content.

Questions? Contact Rick Anderson — rca.starid@gmail.com