Theatre in Review: Vladimir (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)

	Francesca Faridany, Erin Darke. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

The name in the title of Erika Sheffer's play refers to Mr. Putin, although the Russian president never appears onstage. (Boris Yeltsin does, in a riotous opening scene covering his resignation speech, televised on December 31, 1999, seen here as a comedy of errors that climaxes in the sozzled leader urinating into a vase just out camera range.) But Putin is an ineffable presence throughout, presiding over a Russia suffused with corruption, backstabbing, violence, and the suppression of free speech. If Peter Morgan's Patriots traced Putin's Richard III-like ascent to power, Vladimir focuses on the corrosive effects of living in the morally polluted atmosphere he has fostered. In Putin's Russia, everyone is collateral damage, and trying to do good requires an indomitable will. Fortunately, Sheffer has just the character for the job, and director Daniel Sullivan has engaged Francesca Faridany to embody her adamantine strength.

Faridany is Raya, a Moscow-based newspaper reporter ruthlessly dedicated to digging out official deceit and graft. Since it is 2004, five years into Putin's regime, there is plenty to dig out. Recently returned from covering the war in Chechnya, Raya dismisses the sprained wrist and burns she incurred there, although her dismayed daughter Galina notes that Raya's injuries left her with a bad case of sepsis. "It's illegal for a journalist to even be in Chechnya on her own," Galina warns. "I wasn't on my own," Raya replies, defensively. "I was with an infantry division." "That you abandoned on a regular basis," Galina says, accusingly. "Well, I mean, yeah," Raya concedes.

Playing a character of unimpeachable authority, Faridany stalks the stage, surrounded by hypocrites and temporizers unnerved by her bluntly expressed opinions, many of which resonate eerily with the current state of the world. "We've been at war for eight years," she says about Chechnya, "and I know it doesn't feel like it because you can still go to the mall and the movies, and it's not even called a war. But it is. And the people who are sending troops off to murder children and bomb hospitals are the same ones using this country like a personal bank account." Ring any bells?

As others around her accommodate the harsh political reality, Raya insists on going her own way: "You know what he's doing?" she says of Putin. "He's making it so we can't tell which way is up, like a pilot, you know, when they can't find the horizon? Just total confusion. And numbness. Until you feel like there's nothing you can do, so you just do nothing." For her, this is not an option.

And yet, much of Vladimir tracks Raya's dark night of the soul as her investigation into an epic government money-laundering scheme forces her to confront her limits. The caper involves a fictitious tax refund, running to tens of millions of rubles, officially conferred on a US-owned company but in reality dispersed into government officials' personal bank accounts. To get the goods, Raya enlists the services of Yevgeny, an accountant employed by the American firm; she infects him with her zeal, putting him in harm's way.

Meanwhile, Kostya, her editor and longtime comrade in arms, fearing that the clock is ticking on honest reporting, takes a job with a television channel that serves as a mouthpiece for standard government propaganda. It's a decision Raya takes as a personal betrayal; it certainly does nothing to protect Kostya's stomach lining as he struggles with carefully manicured news reports and diva-like anchors. And, as she pursues her investigation, Raya is haunted by the memory of Chovka, a young Chechen woman she befriended; even more nagging than the fear that her journalism changes nothing is the thought that her sympathetic coverage of Chechnya has facilitated a terrorist attack that murdered hundreds of Russian schoolchildren. "You said I had to make it so people couldn't look away," Chovka says. "No one's looking away now."

Faridany's Raya is a brusquely efficient professional -- she never indulges in an unnecessary word or movement -- bent on exposing her country's downward spiral. ("I'm fine not having friends," she tells Galina, tacitly admitting that her abrasive tactics drive people away.) At the same time, Raya reveals a growing vulnerability as the war continues to rage and she survives an attempted poisoning. Facing down friends and enemies with the same brutal skepticism, she is a warrior for the truth, but wait for the moment when, weary of lies, secret money trails, and random killings, she tells the worried Galina, on her wedding day, that she is "genuinely good," insisting that neither she nor her long-gone husband is responsible: "It's like when two ugly people make a beautiful child, genetic mystery, but it happened with you." It's a tacit admission that ordinary happiness lies far outside her reach.

Equally fine is Norbert Leo Butz's Kostya, a boozing, skirt-chasing buffoon -- "Why are you in my home with an embryo?" asks Raya, sizing up his latest conquest -- who, nevertheless, has fought the good fight and is too tired to keep on. (In yet another line that echoes today's headlines, Kostya tells an old school friend turned Putin toady, "Your guy needs chaos, Andrei. But it's gotta be at the border -- Far enough that it doesn't affect anyone, but he can still point to it and say, 'I'm a tough guy, I'm really doing things over here'.") Butz effectively charts his character's growing self-disgust, which explodes in a physical battle on the job and a brutal confrontation with Raya, who forces him to face what he has become. Less pyrotechnic but equally effective is David Rosenberg as Yevgeny, who, initially reluctant to get involved in Raya's investigation, refuses to back down even when she begs him to, risking it all to expose a scandal that reaches top government levels.

To be sure, the script is a bit unwieldy, especially in the first act, which takes its time putting the complicated plot into motion. In the early scenes, I had the sensation one sometimes has reading John Le Carre's novels, navigating a certain amount of intentional confusion before the story ignites. Still, Sheffer makes hair-raisingly clear the peril of living in a society where common honesty requires extraordinary courage, and the second act lays out in pitiless detail the costs of Raya's crusade.

Sullivan's direction matches the play's deliberate methodology, quietly showing the characters navigate Putin's labyrinth of lies, angling for safety, and, possibly, a little profit; when the action detonates in a series of brutal face-offs, he doesn't hold back. In addition to the three leads, there's also fine work from Erik Jensen as a Kremlin official who candidly notes, "People don't mind getting fucked as long as you use the right lubricant;" Olivia Deren Nikkanen as Galina, torn between admiration and fear for her mother; Jonathan Walker as an American executive who preaches transparency until it becomes inconvenient; and Erin Darke as Chovka, the specter who lurks in Raya's stained conscience.

For a play about the power (or lack thereof) of the media, scenic designer Mark Wendland folds several locations into a television studio setting, giving projection designer Lucy Mackinnon ample room for images of Putin and subtitles providing time frames, locations, and news updates. Japhy Weideman's lighting transforms the space, creating looks that are alternately noirish and clinical. Costume designer Jess Goldstein dresses the characters in a way that echoes Western styles yet is subtly different. In addition to original music, Dan Moses Schreier provides key effects such as traffic, explosions, birds' wings, and the cawing of crows.

Reportedly suggested by the career of Anna Nemtsova, a Russian journalist who now writes for leading American publications, Vladimir is as tough and uncompromising a piece of writing to be seen on a New York stage right now. It offers its protagonist an agonizing choice: to keep reporting -- no matter the consequences to herself and others, fully aware that little may change -- or to do nothing. And in Faridany's towering performance, we understand the costs of choosing. --David Barbour