Nancy Marvy, Miriam Schwartz, and Laura Esping Photo by Sarah Whiting

The play takes place in June 2021, just over a year into the global upheaval of COVID-19. Three family members have come to Vienna where the oldest of them, 90-year-old Gabriele (Marvy), is to receive a prestigious literary award for her most recent criticism of Wittgenstein, the capstone of her life-long work in the field. It is Gabriele's first time in Vienna since she was a 7-year-old fleeing with her parents and brother, one of those among the 200,000 Jews who then lived in the city that were fortunate enough to escape as Hitler's forces were being given a hero's welcome in Austria.

To mark the occasion, Gabriele's daughter Elizabeth (Esping) and granddaughter Natasha (Schwartz) have accompanied her, in part to share in their mother/grandmother's honor. There is also the fact that Gabriele needs assistance to get around, to transfer from wheelchair to walker to sofa, and even to tie her shoes. She knows her life is entering its final stanza, but laughs it off, as when her daughter says that her shoes are cute, and she comes back with "Oy, when they compliment your shoes, you know you're kaput."

Elizabeth is the artistic director of a non-profit theater in Seattle, one she founded and has become her life's work. To her mother's dismay, she cannot allow texts and emails from the theater to go unanswered, even in Vienna, as the company is in the frantic survival mode of the COVID shut-down. Natasha is an attorney living in New York, constantly fending off her mother's and grandmother's questions about when she and her long-time boyfriend will get married, and if he isn't the one, why not break it off, because, after all, her biological clock is ticking.

Gabrielle is thrilled to revisit the city where she formed wonderful childhood memories, with its glistening culture, handsome boulevards, and luscious baked desserts. Elizabeth and Natasha can only think of Vienna as the city that stole their family's birthright and turned them and its other Jews into refugees. The one place Natasha really does want to see is the gracious Viennese apartment their family owned, described so often by her grandmother. A connection through a co-worker in New York offers them the opportunity to do this. But it is the one place Gabriele emphatically does not want to see. She relishes the enchantment of Vienna, but not the specter of the beloved rooms from which she fled.

With this elaborate but certainly plausible setup, Perloff has crafted a genuinely funny play, one that is also gently moving in revealing the wounds and unmet needs each of these women bear, and revealing in its depiction of how a city can at once be a font of culture, intellectualism, and sophistication and also a cauldron of bigotry, hate, and barbarism. As for Perloff's humor, it comes deftly by way of authentic emotions and conversations woven into the narrative, not as one liners dropped into the script, begging for a rim-shot. Not a thread of the dialogue or the events depicted feels like an artificial construction.

The set designed by Michael Hoover provides a flexible space that primarily serves as a hotel suite in Vienna, with two sets of French doors opening up to a marvelous depiction of the gables and steeples of old Vienna. Dorfman has his actors exit and re-enter as they seamlessly shift from one time to the next, and from one location to another. These three generations of women know one another intimately, borne out as they deliver lines with perfect timing, whether their intent it is to shock, amuse, or comfort.

Nancy Marvy is a joy as Gabrielle, haunted by the strife she lived through, and by a family secret that she has held for many years, while facing the world with a galvanized armor of optimism. Laura Esping's Elizabeth, caught between a mother with increasing needs, a daughter who has not yet found her mooring in life, and a career at risk of drowning, persuasively portrays the stress she must manage, balanced with her love for both mother and daughter. Miriam Schwarz–so welcome back on a Twin Cities stage–beautifully presents the warring emotions of love, resentment, and admiration for her high-achieving mother and grandmother, and anxiety over her unsettled love life.

Bo Rainford's costume designs are entirely appropriate for the characters, with the array of scarves with which Gabriele adorns her neck a nod to her efforts to retain what elegance she can in her fleeting years. C. Andrew Mayer's sound design provides music, capturing the classical sounds of Vienna, along with the sounds of traffic and street activity, and a recording of Gabriele's award acceptance speech, given in German. This is the first play I have seen that credits not only a properties designer (Bobbie Smith) but also a food props designer (Patty Mathews)–and here I was wondering which local bakery furnished the incredible looking pastries. Paul Epton's lighting design is effective throughout.

Throughout Vienna, Vienna, Vienna there are references to Chekhov's The Three Sisters and its characters, starting when Elizabeth says that when her theater is finally able to reopen, it will be with a production of that play–a notion Natasha finds preposterous, feeling that people will want to come back from the pandemic to something cheery, not the gravitas of Chekhov–she scoffs at the idea of a possible tag line, "Welcome back, Come share the despair."

The play's structure of three closely related woman, each with a trajectory that doesn't seem, at the moment, to be going as imagined, parallels Chekhov's play in some ways, and the romanticized memories of Vienna (especially Gabriele's) are reminiscent of sisters Olga, Masha, and Irina's longings to return to Moscow. Perloff is clearly intentional in drawing these comparisons between her play and Dr. Chekhov's, but Vienna, Vienna, Vienna winds up with much sunnier prospects for its three women. This is a play one actually could relish when first returning from a pandemic shut-down.

Six Points is to be congratulated and commended for its continued commitment to new work in the face of ever-tightening budgets and shrinking funding for arts organizations. The fruit of that commitment, a work as robust and fully formed as Vienna, Vienna, Vienna will hopefully boost their resolve to continue those efforts.

Vienna, Vienna, Vienna runs through April 12, 2026, at Six Points Theater, Highland Park Community Center, 1978 Ford Parkway, Saint Paul MN. For tickets and information, please call 651-647-4315 or visit www.sixpointstheater.org.

Playwright: Carey Perloff; Director: Robert Dorfman; Scenic Design: Michael Hoover; Costume Design: Bo Rainford; Lighting Design: Paul Epton; Sound Design: C. Andrew Mayer; Properties Design: Bobbie Smith; Food Props Artisan: Patty Matthews; Dramaturg: Wendy Weckwerth; Assistant Director: Don Hart; Stage Manager: Becca Kravchenko; Assistant Stage Manager: Samantha Fairchild Poppen

Cast: Laura Esping (Elizabeth), Nancy Marvy (Gabriele), Miriam Schwartz (Natasha).