In Lauren Yee’s new play, “Mother Russia,” two friends sharing their first-ever Filet-O-Fish experience a rapturous epiphany. When they finally pause from tearing at the sandwich like hungry badgers, it’s only to roll their eyes in ecstasy and lick goopy tartar sauce from their fingers. The friends, played by Steven Boyer (“Kimberly Akimbo”) and Adam Chanler-Berat (“Peter and the Starcatcher”), throw themselves onto that sandwich, a pitiful-looking mess of mush, like people who haven’t eaten in a week.
“The sauce is tangy, and the cheese is bright and lacking in sickly color,” Evgeny (Chanler-Berat) marvels.
Dmitri (Boyer) is equally struck, asking, “Is this what capitalism tastes like?”
It sure is, especially in 1992 Russia, as McDonald’s lands in the post-Soviet country as a symbol of freedom and opportunity.
By the end of “Mother Russia,” however, Dmitri and Evgeny learn that capitalism tastes as much like greed, violence and betrayal as it does tartar sauce and fried fish. A few people come out on top — often the same ones who were already there — and most get shafted over and over.
This doesn’t sound like a barrel-o-laughs, but Yee’s play, which opened Monday at Signature Theater, is as funny as it is smart. This is a comedy with a lot on its mind, like Talene Monahon’s recent “Meet the Cartozians,” in which issues about Armenian identity brushed up against modern American pop culture.
“Mother Russia” is part of a cycle that also includes Yee’s “The Great Leap” (2018), which straddles San Francisco and Beijing in 1989, and “Cambodian Rock Band” (2020), which jumps between the 1970s and 2000s in Cambodia. All three look at countries and people in transition, struggling to adapt, or not, to Western ideas and culture. But this production, nimbly directed by Teddy Bergman, commits to the situation’s dark humor in a way that makes it a lot more effective than its dramatically slack predecessors.
“Mother Russia” (mostly) follows the longtime pals Dmitri and Evgeny as they try to adapt to the new Russian order. The meek Evgeny, son of a former powerful bureaucrat, had tried his luck in Moscow but things didn’t pan out, so he’s back in his hometown, St. Petersburg. There, he runs into an old friend, the exuberant Dmitri, who seems to model his behavior and lingo on American gangster movies and rap videos.
Dmitri has taken over a small shop — a shack cluttered with almost too neatly stacked supplies — where he claims to sell “everything” but which actually serves as the base for a surveillance operation he’s been hired to conduct. Evgeny, whose menacing dad has turned to the protection business (read: racketeering), decides to help out when he learns the operation’s target is Katya (Rebecca Naomi Jones), a singer and former defector on whom he’s long had a crush. He eventually arranges a not-so-fortuitous meeting on a bus, and they strike up a friendship over the course of regular encounters. Naturally, Evgeny withholds the small detail that he’s been spying on her. (The scenic design by the dots collective allows for swift, evocative location changes.)
All three characters share disillusions. Evgeny’s knowledge of Marxist economics did not help him better see, let alone force, the invisible hand that supposedly steers capitalism. Katya’s American experience fizzled when her novelty faded. (“No one wanted to hear me sing ‘tear down that wall’ once there was no wall left to tear,” she says.)
Only Dmitri remains upbeat. His fantasy of a cushy K.G.B. job evaporated, but he continues to fully believe in a system that he thinks will let him catch a break one day. He does not realize the game is rigged against people like him — admittedly he’s also not smart, cunning and ruthless enough to fully profit from the new Russia being auctioned off.
The one who understands what’s going on better than everybody else is Mother Russia herself, portrayed by David Turner in a resplendent red dress and headwear, and an expertly deployed accent that hilariously borrows from America’s Borscht Belt to evoke the one beyond the Iron Curtain.
Mother Russia, providing a sardonic running commentary, has seen it all before so she scoffs when Evgeny exclaims they are living in “unprecedented times.” She retraces an also-ran career in theater that has always left her on the sidelines despite her aggrandizing self-image, and at one point delivers, at rat-a-tat pace, a potted history of Russia that covers centuries in bullet points. Sample section: “Perestroika, Frere Jacques, A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Yakov Smirnoff, Garry Kasparov, Three’s Company, too. The first Chechen war. The second Chechen war. Why so many Chechen wars? What is going on over there?”
By the end, the wheels of history keep turning — in place. How do you say “The more things change …” in Russian?
Mother Russia Through March 15 at Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
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