Jada Rifkin, Kiana Woo, Scott McCulloch, Sean Jacklin, Hayden Finkelshtain, Lisa Norton and Hilary Adams in Life Sucks. | Photo provided by the company

When I sat down to watch Life Sucks., the inaugural production from Outliers Theatre Collective, the generic and scrappy set seemed designed for sketch comedy: curtained backdrop, a few chairs, a table, vacant picture frames, a piano, a little promontory off to the side jutting out towards the audience and a small mounted projection screen displaying the company’s name—eventually serving as a Brechtian title card display. 

When the cast takes their places at the top of the show, they speak directly to us as actors and the comedy troupe ambiance is even more palpable. But it is in this fourth-wall breaking prologue that the tight specificity and theatrical tension of Aaron Posner’s script—a modern, meta-theatrical adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya—becomes clear. The ersatz sketch comedy aesthetics, rather than diminish the very real dramatic intensity of the unfolding story, adds a layer of theatrical artifice that, paradoxically, increases the intimacy. Continue Reading