As part of an ongoing campaign to culture-ify ourselves, Karin and I bought tickets to the “Club Friday” incarnation of the Citadel Theatre’s season ticket offerings. Roughly, this means that every month or so we’re forced to dress up and drag ourselves to a play. Friday (oddly enough also Good Friday) was the fifth installment of our six-ticket extravaganza, and we were treated to a rural-Alberta adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Vanya.

Set the mood, the play unfolds: The pre-depression struggles of a twisted family across unfolding, multi-angled relationships, through financial straits, across disparate realities, misunderstandings, and states of existence.

Until now, each play in the Citadel series has been dramatically different: a tragic drama, a one-woman monologue, a musical, and a neo-modern greek-thing performed in a swimming pool stage. But it seems we’ve come full circle and we were treated to another tragic family drama starring Tom Wood the playwright as lead actor.

It was intense. Perhaps staring directly at the numerous mirrors of glittering metaphor was a little to emotionally intense. Maybe I was just tired. Some of the casting was questionable. Mostly, it fell together, though it took a bit to get over the range of ability on the stage. Wood was charged, as usual, dropping his requisite f-bomb well into the second act. And someone in the audience was wearing the most foul-smelling perfume I’ve been subject to in a long time. My throat dried up completely and I had to buy an overpriced beverage to soften the intermission.

But we do things like that: we watch plays and disect the characters, turning them from illusions into charactatures illuminating the gaps in our own lives. These people walking around on stage, pretending, bring out the folds of our own existence and shine little spotlights right back towards the audience. “So which character are you?” I ask Karin during the break. We reluctantly fill in the roles. “Yeah.”