Life Sucks
Written by Aaron Posner
Directed by Jeff Wise
Theatre Row – Acorn Theatre
June 23, 2019
Production website
💉💉💉 out of 5.

Life Sucks – totally sucked in the first 10 minutes but then moment by moment totally become one of my most memorable plays of the summer.    Life Sucks is “sort of adapted from ‘Uncle Vanya,’” as playwright, Mr. Posner puts it. (He had already gone to the Chekhov well three years ago with his well-received “Stupid _____ Bird,” based loosely on The Seagull.   Here in Uncle Vanya land, the forlorn Vanya still shares a home with the plain Sonia but now we appear to be in the United States since there is talk of student loans and American money.  Both Vanya and the brooding Dr. Aster still pine for Sonia’s stepmother, Ella.

Those like me who have read Uncle Vanya time again and again in play reading class, all will identify with both the characters and the story line.  But now the play is opened up to a much bigger audience.  Usually I would HATE this “making the classics modern”  by cheap contemporary references – which happened in the first 10 minuets – but then, as the play broke down into two characters meetings, the play became much richer.  The pain of love that will never be, lost dreams, bleak futures and a life just teetering on this side of clinical depression really hits you in the gut.  

As one of the character claims early in the play, “Spoiler alert, most of us won’t get everything we want.”

Playwright Mr. Posner also leaves a bit of wiggle room for improvisation and unobtrusive audience participation, down to the conclusion. The show’s ending was comically surreal at the performance.  I just had no idea where it was going to end – and it went there and I was thrilled.