Vanya and Sonia and
Masha and Spike

by Christopher Durang

VANYA, a fifty-seven-year-old gay man who lives reclusively with his adopted sister in their family home, has written his first play, but the reading of it is interrupted by twenty-something SPIKE’s texting on his cell phone. Here, VANYA continues his tirade against the modern world.

Scene

The exterior backyard of Vanya’s family’s country home.

Time

Afternoon, the present.

VANYA

I have the remainder of my life to nap. I’m not done yet. Once upon a time, WE LICKED POSTAGE STAMPS! We didn’t have answering machines. You had to call people back. We ate Spam, just like the soldiers in World War II did. Have you heard of World War II?

We played Scrabble and Monopoly. We didn’t play video games, in some virtual reality, where we would kill policemen and prostitutes as if that was some sort of entertainment.

The popular entertainment wasn’t so insane back then. It was sometimes corny, but sincere. We all saw the movie Davy Crockett and wore coonskin caps.

That may not sound sane, wearing those caps, but it was very innocent. And we all did it, there was a solidarity about it, unlike being alone in your room killing prostitutes in a video game.

We followed The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Which starred the real-life Ozzie and Harriet Nelson.

But Adventures was a strange word for the show because it was extremely uneventful. They did things like . . . make popcorn in the kitchen. Or . . . look for missing socks.

In retrospect they seemed medicated.

It was a stupid show, but it was calming. You didn’t feel it was stirring people up and creating serial killers.

I’m sorry I’m getting off the point. But my point is the ’50s were idiotic but I miss parts of them. When I was thirteen I saw Goldfinger with Sean Connery as James Bond, and I didn’t get the meaning of the character name of Pussy Galore. Went right over my head.

Nowadays, three-year-olds get the joke. They can barely walk and they know what Pussy Galore means.

The weather is changing, the culture is very weird. I’m not a conservative, but I do miss things in the past.

I Love Lucy was pretty wonderful. And the whole country watched it. We saw Davy Crockett. And The Mickey Mouse Show. Boys just past puberty would fixate on Annette Funicello.

We didn’t identify with rock stars, we identified with Mouseketeers. Annette, Darlene Gillespie, Cubby O’Brien.

My favorite was Tommy Kirk, who was one of the Hardy Boys on the Mickey Mouse show. Later he starred in Disney’s Old Yeller, about a boy and his dog. His father was fighting in the Civil War, but Tommy was the one who took the responsibility for being the grown-up. Not his mother or younger brother.

And initially he didn’t want the dog, but then he bonded with it. And at the end of the film Old Yeller gets rabies and foams at the mouth, and poor Tommy Kirk has to shoot his dog, crying his eyes out as he does so.

It was a traumatic moment in our national past. A shared one.

I wondered what happened to Tommy Kirk, and I did a Google search and I learned that sometime after he was on Son of Flubber, Walt Disney found out the Tommy Kirk was gay and he fired him. He dropped his contract.

Meanwhile Tab Hunter was gay too, but his studio just saw to it that he went on pretend dates with starlets. They didn’t fire Tab Hunter. They starred him in movies opposite Sophia Loren, for God’s sake. Tommy Kirk on the other hand was mistreated, and I TAKE IT PERSONALLY. As I expect he does too.

He stopped making movies. He took drugs for a period. And then later he got better and became a minister. And now he runs a rug-cleaning business. I guess he’s all right.

But he’s had to go through the same changes I have—no more licking of postage stamps, no more typewriters or letters, no more shared national TV shows like Ozzie and Harriet, which even though it was boring still it was a SHARED MEMORY BETWEEN US. There are no shared memories anymore.

Now, now there’s twitter and email and Facebook and cable and satellite, and the movies and TV shows are all worthless, and we don’t even watch the same worthless things together, it’s all separate. And our lives are . . . disconnected.

And you come in here and say you almost had a part on Entourage 2 as if that’s an achievement of some kind. And I don’t know what you’re talking about.

I’m worried about the future. I miss the past. I don’t want to talk anymore. I’m going to go sit in the other room. I don’t know why I exploded. Sorry.