Cape Playhouse's VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE Opens Tonight

The Cape Playhouse follows its sold-out run of My Fair Lady with the 2013 Tony Award winner for Best Play, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike. Christopher Durang's laugh-out-loud comedy, directed by Shear Madness director and co-writer, Bruce Jordan, opens tonight, August 11, and runs through August 22 only.

Middle-aged siblings Vanya and Sonia live a quiet life in the Pennsylvania farmhouse where they grew up. When their movie-star sister Masha makes a surprise visit with her hot boy-toy Spike in tow, so begins an unforgettable weekend of rivalry, regret and hilarious racket in this wacky, Chekhovian mash-up. By the end of their impromptu family reunion, this lovable bunch won't ever be the same!

Christopher Durang's plays include A History of American Film (Tony Award nomination, Best Book of a Musical), The Actor's Nightmare, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You (Obie Award, Off-Broadway run, 1981-83), Beyond Therapy (on Broadway in 1982, with Dianne Wiest and John Lithgow), Baby With the Bathwater (Playwrights Horizons, 1983), The Marriage of Bette and Boo (Public Theater, 1985; Obie Award, Dramatists Guild Hull Warriner Award), Laughing Wild (Playwrights Horizons, 1987), and Durang Durang (an evening of six plays at Manhattan Theatre Club, 1994). In 1996, he was commissioned by the Rodgers and Hammerstein Foundation to write a new book for the popular musical Babes in Arms. His play Betty's Summer Vacation (Drama Desk Award nomination) had its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons in February 1999 to great critical acclaim and sold-out houses and was extended three times. His musical (with music by Peter Melnick), Adrift In Macao, premiered at New York Stage and Film in the summer of 2002. Mrs. Bob Cratchit's Wild Christmas Binge was commissioned by Pittsburgh's City Theater and had its world premiere in November 2002. He has an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama. Early in his career, he won a Guggenheim, a Rockefeller, the CBS Playwriting Fellowship, the Lecompte du Nouy Foundation grant, and the Kenyon Festival Theatre Playwriting Prize. In 1995 he won the prestigious three-year Lila Wallace Readers' Digest Award; as part of his grant, he ran a writing workshop for adult children of alcoholics. Since 1994 he has been co-chair with Marsha Norman of the Playwriting Program at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild Council.

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike premiered at the McCarter Theatre in 2012. Following an Off-Broadway run, it transferred to Broadway in 2013. It received six Tony Award nominations and was awarded the Tony, Drama Desk, NY Drama Critics Circle and Outer Critics Circle Awards for Best New Play.

The cast of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is led by Cape Playhouse favorite John Scherer (Broadway productions of LoveMusik, Sunset Boulevard and By Jeeves) as Vanya, and making their Cape Playhouse debuts are Toni DiBuono (Broadway productions of The Boys from Syracuse, Wonderful Town and original cast member of Forbidden Broadway) as Sonia; Margaret Reed ("As the World Turns", HBO's Mildred Pierce, Off-Broadway Orson's Shadow, LA Premiere of Other People's Money at the Pasadena Playhouse) as Masha; Gregory Isaac Stone (Denver Center's The Lord of the Flies) as Spike; ; Danielle Lee Greaves (Broadway productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, Rent, Hairspray, Sunset Boulevard and Show Boat) as Cassandra; and Maren Bush (film Reaching Home and television's "Sharing") as Nina.

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