"Aaron Posner's LIFE SUCKS. Urges Chekhov and His Characters To Get To The Point"
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"Posner acts rather like a tailor, undoing the original script's seams and opening it out, providing room for a form of hilarity grounded in existential sorrow…Jeff Wise skillfully guides his cast through one mortifying situation after another…For all that Posner builds his work on another artist's foundation, he is a true original."
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"What’s magnetic about Posner’s updates is their highly dramatic flair. He has great personal fun compounding his Rubik’s Cubes with metatheatrical bits that might have had the good doctor Chekhov stuck for a critical diagnosis...Obviously smart as a whip with his innovations, Posner sticks nonetheless to Chekhov’s basic proceedings...By adhering to Chekhov’s themes, Posner keeps love, longing and frustration streaming through the proceedings."
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"We can't help thinking Chekhov would be delighted with Aaron Posner's 'Life Sucks'...Posner's characters use profanity onstage that would no doubt have shocked Chekhov and his audiences. Their concerns reflect modern times...What's more, the actors are continually and delightfully breaking the fourth wall...What makes this re-interpretations so funny and so true is the way Posner makes everything that Chekhov sedately states or subtly implies blatantly announced.”
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“The story is Chekhov’s ‘Uncle Vanya,’ but the characters have had the sawdust in their veins replaced with real blood...These characters know exactly where they are...They are here to defend their point of view...An evening of love, longing, and loss...Peppered between those layers are bursts of brilliance, belly laughs...and moves that would put a three-card-monty master to shame...The writing, directing, and acting combine to produce a little slice of heaven.”
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"With a cast made up of seasoned pros pulling out every jocular witticism that can be found in the play,..Fleeting joy gets its blender buttons pushed with absentee glee by all, including Pickles' puppets, with a pained, weighted indulgence masked as light depression for laughs. It clearly is smart in its humor, but deep subtext is nowhere to be found. Fleeting joy gets its blender buttons pushed with absentee glee by all, including Pickles' puppets, with a pained, weighted indulgence masked as light depression for laughs."
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"I’m afraid that I can’t join in the enthusiasm for the play. Posner’s method seems to involve using the F word as often as possible, adding a few contemporary touches such as a reference to student loans, and breaking the fourth wall not only to address the audience but to interrogate it...The direction by Jeff Wise at times seemed sluggish, at other times indulgent. Aside for a few moments, such as the confrontation scene between Ella and Vanya, I was rarely moved."
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"A self-help talk-show version of this magnificent play, one that requires audience participation in the most cringeworthy of ways, and embarasses itself in the process. Jeff Wise directs with a shamelessly heavy hand, flirting with cute...The actors — a cast that might have been good in a good play — are arch and metatheatrical...Why wreck Chekhov in the process of showing us what we already know?"
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