By Griffin Horn
NEW HOPE, PA —Lisa James Otto, the founder and star of Lisa James Otto Country Properties, makes her Broadway Debut in Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, now up for six Tony Awards, including Best Play.
With a love reminiscent of Cole Porter, George Kaufman, or Moss Hart, who often referenced their friends onstage and sometimes included them as characters, Durang uses Lisa as an offstage character, looking to broker the family home around which the action of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike pivots. Instead of a cherry orchard, Durang sets his quirky love letter to Chekhov in a Bucks County Estate – pond, heron, morning room and all – which is being unexpectedly listed through Lisa’s real estate company. Lisa herself often calls the home to speak to the shut-in tenants, who are in the process of being evicted, and who intone her name with the smoldering tempo of a steamroller. Talk about branding.
In real life, Lisa is the friend who sold Durang the home that inspired the setting for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, a home that, while not a title character (in a play where almost every character is a title character), is a central one. Durang transmutes the home, and Bucks County generally, into metaphors for the closeness and distance between people – from the young poet living next door, to the fifteen mile drive to the nearest convenience store, to the costume parties where celebrities like Maggie Smith might be in attendance … even if she goes unrecognized. Durang’s casual homage is as much an in-joke between friends as it is free advertising as it is a quiet thank you for Lisa’s role in inspiring the piece. Lisa’s father, Wynne James Jr., worked with Bucks County artists like George Kaufman and Moss Hart, and Otto continues to match luminaries of all sorts with homes that help them do their best work.

