Anton Chekhov was a writer and a doctor during the 1892 cholera outbreak. He experienced a similar health crisis to the one we are in today which also included mass quarantines, face masks, fear, and uncertainty. And along with it, similar psychological, existential, and emotional ramifications. During the outbreak he wrote to a friend, “I feel lonely, tired and full of worry…My soul is exhausted.” Five years later, he wrote Uncle Vanya and one hundred and twenty years after that, Aaron Posner handed me Life Sucks. I didn’t feel a strong need to do this play when I first read it. I loved it, but it didn’t call to me in the same way Aaron’s Stupid F**king Bird did. And then the last two years happened, I re-read the play and it punched me straight in the gut.

 

Working on Life Sucks in the era of COVID, the characters seem like they could have walked right off the street and up onto the stage. They are in a crisis much like we are – their crisis simply being life. They don’t know how to actualize their dreams or to articulate hope. Hell, they don’t even know how they’ll wake up the next morning. But they do. The past few years have been hard and quiet and painful. For all of us. They have been so utterly Russian. Personally, the only thing I could do at times was look at myself and laugh. That’s Chekhov. He always finds us when we need a lesson in acceptance. He asks us to find the timeless, ridiculous comedy in dealing with the circumstances life has dealt us.

 

Life Sucks is both Chekov’s and Posner’s medicine for us. Chekhov asks us to look at our absurdities, contradictions, complexities and longings with radical honesty and a hell of a good sense of humor and Posner has taken the healing a step further. Unlike in Uncle Vanya one hundred and twenty years ago, you’re a character in Life Sucks tonight. This play can’t happen without you. You will see why.

 

Life Sucks runs Feb. 3 – 27.  Buy tickets here.