Paper Wing’s new play mixes regret, acrimony, family and comedy.

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, the Tony winner for Best Play in 2013, comes from playwright Christopher Durang, who is known for satire and absurdity in works like Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them and For Whom The Southern Belle Tolls.

Vanya et al is steeped in the playwriting tradition of Anton Chekhov. It’s a slice of life about three siblings (Spike is one of their companions) growing into bitter and anti-social people with fewer and fewer saving graces, told through Durang’s humorous lens.

“I had bad dreams last night,” says Sonia. “I dreamt I was 52 and I wasn’t married.”

“Were you dreaming in the documentary form?” Vanya asks.

Paper Wing owner Koly McBride says its qualities – funny, quirky, simple, smart – lend themselves to Paper Wing’s aesthetic. And she has tapped Erin Davidson, who graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a theater degree in 2014, to direct for the first time. Previously, Davidson played Bad Idea Bear in Paper Wing’s production of Avenue Q, and choreographed their Valentine’s Burlesque show.

“I read [the play] and fell in love with it,” Davidson says. “We’re spending a lot of time ‘at the table,’ doing a lot of analytical work with the text itself.”

That’s a process in which they try to discover things that might not be written, to get at the underlying backstories and psychologies of characters. There’s not a lot of action or set; the play lives and breathes on its dialogue, which suggests the deeper pathos and histories beneath.

“You have to pull out a lot of depth,” Davidson says.

VANYA AND SONIA AND MASHA AND SPIKE runs 8pm Thu-Sat, Jan. 11-27, at Paper Wing Theatre, 320 Hoffman Ave., Monterey. $22-$24. 905-5684, paperwing.com