Review: In ‘Fires, Ohio,’ Chekhov’s world meets the modern climate crisis

Each year, the Alliance Theatre’s Kendeda Prize helps introduce an emerging playwright to a wider audience. This season’s winner, Beth Hyland, arrives with Fires, Ohio, an ambitious contemporary riff on Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya running through March 22. Set in a Midwestern college town as wildfires approach, the one-act drama explores modern paralysis in the face of looming catastrophe. The play reveals Hyland as a writer of real talent, even if this production sometimes feels more like an intriguing experiment than a fully realized drama.

Hyland condenses Chekhov’s many-peopled world into a chamber piece for five characters. The setting is a comfortable but unremarkable middle class living room, the sort of deceptively familiar and innocuous domestic space where resentments quietly accumulate. As in Chekhov, the characters here are haunted by frustration, regret and the uneasy sense that life has slipped past them.

The difference is that Hyland’s characters often process their anxieties through spoken Google searches and Reddit threads, narrating online posts and scrolling through digital advice in real time. What might sound static on paper becomes surprisingly dynamic onstage as the actors give life to uniquely modern moments of digital thought. The device captures something recognizable about how contemporary people absorb and process information while trying to make sense of their lives.

The wildfire threatening the family home provides the play’s most striking conceptual shift. In Chekhov’s plays, environmental destruction appears as a warning on the horizon. Here, the disaster has already arrived. Smoke hangs in the air while the characters continue their familiar cycles of frustration and inertia.

Director Marissa Wolf keeps the action moving at a brisk pace — perhaps too brisk for material that draws so heavily from Chekhov’s rhythms. Chekhov’s plays often gain their power from pauses, stillness and the slow accumulation of tension. With its compressed cast, quick pacing and short one-act running time, Fires, Ohio sometimes feels hurried, as though the drama might benefit from more breathing room.

Wolf has assembled a strong ensemble to navigate Hyland’s demanding script. As the professor, David de Vries is neatly cast, embodying the character’s intellectual vanity with ease. If the professor’s hypochondria never entirely convinces — de Vries projects too much physical and spiritual robustness — the performance otherwise fits comfortably.

Rebeca Robles and Billy Harrigan Tighe, playing siblings Sonia and John, make both monologues and exchanges engaging. Tighe’s John, steeped in the internet’s “alpha-male” self-help culture, gets one of the play’s most memorable passages as he recounts a painfully awkward date that occurs offstage. The scene reveals something deeper than simple groupthink misogyny: a young man who has absorbed endless strategies for dating but is horrified to discover he has nothing to say to a woman.

Hyland has said in interviews that her intention in writing was to find an opportunity to give Chekhov’s passive character Sonia greater agency. In Fires, Ohio, Sonia does act, though the result is unmistakably Chekhovian. The play’s final moment lands with dark comic clarity. In Chekhov’s world, action and inaction can feel equally futile; the tragedy lies in recognizing the problem while remaining unable to change the conditions that created it. Hyland captures that paradox elegantly.

At times Fires, Ohio can feel like an ambitious exercise, testing ideas about Chekhov, climate anxiety and digital age consciousness. That is less a criticism than a reflection of the play’s origins — the Kendeda Prize is designed to bring work by emerging playwrights to the stage. Even when the play doesn’t fully coalesce, Hyland’s talent is unmistakable.


Where & When

Fires, Ohio is onstage at Alliance’s Hertz Theatre through March 22. Ticket prices depend on showing and seating.
1280 Peachtree St. NE.

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Andrew Alexander is an Atlanta-based writer.