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Crime and Punishment. It may be short by Dostoyevsky standards, but the 1866 novel has the density and psychological complexity of an epic. Distilling it for a stage presentation of only 90 minutes with a cast of just three took chutzpah – and sharp minds.
The Heart of the Matter
My memory of my long-ago reading of Crime and Punishment rests much more on its dungeon-like atmosphere than on the story itself. Paradoxically, this production’s wide-open stage with essentially no set establishes that mood quite effectively. Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus’s adaptation dispenses with numerous characters and side plots and pushes the core of the story to center stage, and this staging by Phoenix Theatre Ensemble captures both the novel’s fundamental claustrophobia and the central dilemma of its antihero, the young scholar Raskolnikov (Josh Tyson). Why has he committed the double murder that sets the story in motion? The play consists fundamentally of a drilling down toward the answer.
Tyson’s compelling performance brings the young Robert De Niro to mind. As in the book, the characters and the themes and ideas all coalesce around his tortured Raskolnikov. But just as important to the success of the production are the performances of John Lenartz and Elise Stone, who switch among several characters with little more than voice technique and body language.
Lenartz’s main role is Porfiry, the police inspector who toys mercilessly with Raskolnikov as he tries to get to the bottom of the crime. Stone is heartbreaking as Sonia, the young woman forced to take up prostitution to support her young siblings and drunken father (Lenartz). She’s equally effective in smaller turns as Raskolnikov’s mother and as both of the murdered women.
The script makes a lot of Raskolnikov’s thesis justifying crimes committed by “extraordinary” men in pursuit of the greater good of humankind. This obviously resonates in our era of resurgent populism and cultic authoritarianism. (“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”)
It Was Ever Thus
More incisive, though, is the play’s inquiry into Raskolnikov’s psyche. We have grown accustomed to thinking of the interiority and isolation of the young, their feelings of helplessness and impotence leading to acting out in desperate or violent ways, as products of our current age of social media, climate doomism, and political paralysis. Dostoyevsky shows us that these conditions have always existed in the human soul, especially vivid in young people growing up in adverse economic or psychosocial conditions.
Smoothly and efficiently directed by Karen Case Cook, this powerful piece of theater runs through January 28. It’s followed by Phoenix’s production of Glyn Maxwell’s Drinks with Dead Poets, which also features Stone and Lenartz. Information and tickets are available at the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble website.
