Playwright: Aaron Posner. At: Lookingglass Theatre, Water Tower Pumping Station. Tickets: 312-337-0665; LookingglassTheatre.org; $35 and up. Runs through: Nov. 6
Life Sucks is a beautifully performed, visually lovely, and amusing yet thoughtful showaltogether a really good night out.
It's playwright/director Aaron Posner's contemporary reworking of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, following the success of Posner's Stupid Fucking Bird, based on Chekhov's The Seagull. True, Posner reduces the mighty Russian to Chekhov litehe cuts/combines characters, simplifies story and eliminates subtext, spelling everything out in simple-minded fashionbut the pleasures of Life Sucks are more important than literary analysis.
First, it's laugh-out-loud funny as members of an extended family measure who/where they are in life against not-so-distant hopes and expectations. Invariably disappointed with professional and personal pursuits, let alone achievements, they express themselves via pique, self-absorption, hopeless love and jealousy. That's not funny if it's happening to you, but it can be very funny when observed in others. Heyit's schadenfreude. Even the play's young characters suffer emotionally, victimized by love either unrequited or unsought. As one character remarks at a moment so bleak one can only laugh, "Life, life, life! You can't live with it, you can't..."
Even without the precision mood modulations of director Andrew White, the seven-person cast would be extraordinary. They are among Chicago's most skillful and pleasing players and, unusually, all but one are from outside the Lookingglass ensemble. First among equals is Eddie Jemison as middle-aged Vanya ( one of two character names retained from Chekhov ), an itch of a man you can't help scratching. Bitterly funny and sadly hilarious, Jemison is a brilliant study in comic portraiture. Next, one rejoices at the return to off-Loop theater ( after 20 successful years in LA and New York ) of master actor Jim Ortlieb as The Professor ( no, not Gilligan's Island ); he's self-absorbed, smug, frightened and sourly droll throughout the production.
In fact, drollness and bone-dry delivery are strengths of the entire troupe, which is completed by Chaon Cross ( Professor's beautiful, much-younger wife ), Danielle Zuckerman ( his daughter by his late first wife ), Phillip R. Smith as Vanya's best bud Dr. Aster, and Barbara E. Robertson and Penelope Walker ( playing a lesbian character definitely not in Chekhov ) as intimate family retainers.
They all come, go, pout, pontificate, long and lust on a dreamy set bathed in golden lightingboth by Brian Sidney Bembridgea cozy old house on a North Woods lake, surrounded by birch trees, bird houses, cattails, and colorful leaf litter reflecting the autumnal spirit of the play.
Chekhov didn't create villains. He loved his characters enough to allow them to behave foolishly, as we all do in life. Posner respects that profound sense of the human comedy, but imbues it with such a light touch that you wouldn't know it was Chekhov, unless you knew it was Chekhov.