Chekhov mashup speaks to our times

• Christopher's Durang's new play opens off-Broadway
• David Hyde Pierce, Sigourney Weaver are part of cast
• Much of the play has a breezy tone

If by some chance you've never seen or read a Chekhov play, you'll miss a lot of inside jokes in Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (* * * out of four).

Christopher Durang's endearing new comedy, which opened off-Broadway Monday at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, introduces us to a fellow named Vanya and his adopted sister, Sonia, both well into middle age and living together in a country house in present-day Bucks County, Pa. Their late parents, professors and community theater buffs, had either the foresight or the cruel sense of humor to name them after two luckless characters in Uncle Vanya, though both also evoke figures in other Chekhov plays, including The Seagull and The Three Sisters.

There's another sibling, Masha, a globe-trotting actress who flits in for a visit but, like Vanya's Serebryakov — or, more obviously, Seagull's Arkadina — can't be bothered much by her less fortunate relatives' suffering, even if, in this case, it's not especially quiet. She's more concerned with her younger boyfriend, Spike, who suggests Arkadina's Trigorin reinvented as a chest-thumping doofus surgically attached to his smartphone.

To say that Durang's play has a much lighter tone, and a brighter ending, than any of the other previously mentioned works is not to diminish its inherent passion or compassion. The contemporary playwright is similarly interested, in his characteristically irreverent way, in mining the humor and pathos of his characters. If his Vanya can be overly cute in its references, there are also moments of sublime wackiness and rueful tenderness.

These qualities sometimes co-exist, as when Vanya — played with wonderfully deadpan wit by David Hyde Pierce — has finally had his fill of Masha's rude rube of a beau, and lashes out at Spike with a rambling, nostalgic tirade bemoaning the lack of communal culture in our social-media age. It has the feel of a cathartic outburst for the character and his author — and, judging by the subsequent applause at a recent preview, much of the audience.

But director Nicholas Martin and his winning cast wisely keep the vibe much breezier for most of Vanya. Longtime Durang cohorts Sigourney Weaver and Kristine Nielsen are ideally cast as the vain, maddeningly well-preserved Masha and her lonely, bitter sister. Weaver finds just the right airy haughtiness for her character, while Nielsen's Sonia is as engagingly droll hurling coffee cups to the floor or imitating Maggie Smith as she is touching in showing flashes of the spinster's softer, warmer feelings.

Bill Magnussen nails Spike's aggressive cluelessness, and finds physical comedy in the lad's exhibitionist streak, which demands much shedding and throwing of clothes. And Genevieve Angelson strikes just the right balance between dry and sweet as the neighborhood ingenue Nina, another nod to Seagull.

A delightful Shalita Grant completes the cast as Cassandra, a soothsaying cleaning woman who alludes to a mythical figure who long predates Chekhov and his crew. But this Cassandra's prophecies are as daffy as they are gloomy; like Durang's play as a whole, they'll leave you with a smile — a wistful one, at times, but a smile nonetheless.