Truth, Meet Power: Erika Sheffer’s Vladimir

From Vladimir, at City Center. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

Perhaps it’s something about Russia, but like Peter Morgan’s Patriots, which visited Broadway last spring, Erika Sheffer’s new play Vladimir has a bitter irony implanted in its title. In a sense, both are named after an absence: In Patriots, you could look a long way before finding someone who truly, however he liked to identify, put country before self, power, and greed. In Vladimir, the titular monster is nowhere and everywhere. Sheffer, unlike Morgan in most ways, isn’t interested in fleshing out the man behind the authoritarian mask. She’s interested in what Putin and his ilk have wrought — what they’re continuing to wreak from their marble halls, dachas, and superyachts. Particularly, she’s gripped by questions of storytelling and truth. Her play is driven by a deep belief, no matter how dark the night, in the urgent significance of speaking truth to power; at the same time, it’s shot through with a terrible doubt, like a dream of death that starts you out of sleep — the suspicion that perhaps we have allowed such evil to amass in the world that no righteous struggle is enough, the fear that the monster will always, always win.

“Is it worth it?” a young woman named Chovka (Erin Darke) asks Vladimir’s protagonist, the journalist Raisa Bobrinskaya (Francesca Faridany). “Doing something so utterly pointless with your life?” That’s a playwright interrogating herself, and Sheffer doesn’t bother to disguise the parallel. Chovka has just accused Raisa (Raya to her friends) of having no real skin in the game. “Do you think I’d be a good character?” she sneers. “Is that why you want to talk?” When Raya replies that she doesn’t write about characters but about people, Chovka persists: “But sometimes you think of them as characters.” There’s an added layer of unease here, because the truth is that Chovka might not really be talking at all — Raya might be accusing herself. Chovka only ever appears in Raya’s memories — flashbacks that become more and more nightmarish — of the last time she was in Chechnya. The year for most of the play is 2004. Putin has just “won” his first election after being promoted into the presidency in 1999 by a departing Boris Yeltsin (played here with Death of Stalin–ish dark humor by Jonathan Walker as a fat, bleary drunk who pisses into a vase before his farewell broadcast to the nation). Of course, there was no election, not really (“Why is everyone playing along?” asks Raya, grinding her teeth), and meanwhile, the Second Chechen War is raging. The Russian army is slaughtering civilians. Amnesty International has reported that, in the name of “fighting crime and terrorism,” Russia is engaged in “a campaign to punish an entire ethnic group.” It’s 20 years ago today. It’s today. It’s horror, horror, horror.

Vladimir’s strength lies in its moral core. Though, under Daniel Sullivan’s slick direction, the play doesn’t always feel like the “howl of rage” Sheffer calls it in her program note, it accumulates enough awful truth to leave you sore and shaken. It’s not a coup de théâtre: Its closest cousins are cinematic — movies like Spotlight and All the President’s Men — and even Mark Wendland’s set is engineered to evoke TV: road cases and lighting fixtures on booms, cameras and background screens, everything shiny and black, as if Catwoman’s suit has been stretched across the MSNBC soundstage. It works, letting the play location jump as it needs to and evoking the Kremlin’s ongoing manipulation of the narrative — and at the same time, I often wished that Sheffer and Sullivan found more potential in the stage. Tellingly, there’s a moment in which Raya’s editor Kostya (Norbert Leo Butz) snaps at an old school friend, the snakish Kremlin official Andrei (Erik Jensen), who disingenuously objects to Kostya’s disdain for the bogus debates that preceded Putin’s election: “Since when is public debate a bad thing?” Andrei sniffs. “Last I checked it was a key feature of democracy.” “When it’s legitimate,” retorts Kostya. “When everyone’s arguing, but they all know the ending — that’s not democracy, that’s theater.” It’s common to hear this derogatory simplification of “theater” thrown around in the political sphere, but what does it mean to deploy it in a play? If Sheffer is, once again, intentionally summoning the demons of doubt, the gnawing fears over the efficacy of her form, then that’s legitimate and potentially compelling — where, though, are the opposing forces? The theatrical vocabulary that suggests, despite everything, that there might be an alchemic, unkillable power to this form, and by extension, to journalism, to art, to all pursuit of truth in miraculous expression?

Instead, Vladimir’s few nods toward a more vivid theatricality are some of its shakier moments, more played at than, like the show’s grappling with injustice, deeply felt and structurally integral. As Raya — now pursuing a new and dangerous story of massive government tax fraud — begins to lose the impenetrable steeliness that’s always enabled her to do her job, her visions of Chovka start to twist and morph, their shadows lengthening. The Chechen woman delivers a menacing speech about how a crow ate her heart — so that she might “cure [herself] of hope … the most valuable thing a person can own” — and from then onward, Sullivan and the sound and projection designers (Dan Moses Schreier and Lucy Mackinnon, respectively) signal particularly ominous moments with fluttering shadows and the rustle of flapping wings. But what should be eerie and absorbing has a whiff of contrivance about it — a feeling of “this is the poetic part, now back to the play.” I kept waiting for play and poetry to merge.

Still, there’s enough vitality in Vladimir’s characters (its people, Raya might correct me) to pull us along. “I focused on relationships,” writes Sheffer in her note, “because the past decade has made it clear that familial bonds and friendships are deeply intertwined with the democratic health of a nation.” Especially as the stakes rise, personal confrontations are where her writing feels most muscular. Faridany and Butz illuminate the bluff camaraderie, the boundless frustration, and, beneath it all, the fierce platonic love between Raya and Kostya. Butz brings dignity and nuance to Kostya’s slide from righteous rebel to sellout to good, torn, trapped soul, embalming himself in alcohol to survive (though the culmination of his growing hatred for his once-friend, Andrei, comes along with some not-so-great fight choreography, Butz and Jensen make it sting in the acting). As Galina, Raya’s daughter who lives in constant fear for her audacious mother’s life, Olivia Deren Nikkanen shares two of the play’s most wrenching scenes with Faridany: catching her mother in her arms as Raya convulses and spits blood — the Kremlin has found her; her tea’s been poisoned — Galina holds on, her face a paroxysm of terror and love while Raya chokes, “I didn’t want you to be here for this.” Later, she holds onto her mother again at her own wedding. “Promise me,” she says. “Promise me you’ll get old.”

Is it noble or is it selfish or is it something else entirely that people like Raya can never make that promise? Though Vladimir is fiction, Raya has much in common with the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who reported on the atrocities in Chechnya despite constant threats to her life, and who was murdered in October 2006. There are also echoes between the accountant Yevgeny (a moving David Rosenberg), Raya’s source and eventual brave collaborator in the fraud investigation, and the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who worked for an American investment banker in Moscow, and who was tortured and killed in jail after helping to reveal a $230 million tax swindle attempted by Putin’s government on their firm. The horrific thing is, there are others, so many others, on whom either of these characters could be based. By its ending, Vladimir has amassed the weight of thousands of souls — Russian, Chechen, Ukrainian, Palestinian, Israeli, American. On a book tour to the U.S., Raya stares out at us across a cultural gulf, and Faridany speaks with a Russian accent for the first time — we are hearing her now outside her native language, outside her country, her home, and she sounds so tired, so vulnerable. “That one man should have such power,” she says. “One. Small. Not great intellectual, not insightful. Only talent is finding ugliness and knowing how to use it. And yet this little man take up so much space.” There it is — the howl that Sheffer aspired to, achieved.

Vladimir is at MTC at New York City Center through November 10.