For Raya Bobrinskaya, a hard-nosed newspaper journalist in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, being poisoned is a hazard of the job. She almost expects it to happen to her at some point.
When at last it does, along with the gushing blood and wrenching pain comes instant regret — not over her reporting, but over her 20-something daughter having to witness the attempt on her life.
“I’m so sorry,” Raya says. “I didn’t want you to be here for this, I really didn’t, I promise.”
Until this whoosh of oxygen to the plot, Erika Sheffer’s new play, “Vladimir,” is a very slow burn. From the end of the first act on, though, the drama crackles, full of tension, intrigue and poignancy.
Directed by Daniel Sullivan for Manhattan Theater Club, it is an apt play for this election season: a palimpsest meditation on hijacked democracy. In a program note, Sheffer mentions her distress at the “most recent rise of extremism and violence in American politics.” She began reading about Putin’s ascension, she adds, “and became interested in the point at which a society finds itself on the brink.”
“Who chooses to fight and who stays silent?” she asks.
In “Vladimir,” at New York City Center Stage I, the choice between courage and complacency tends to be an easy one for the restless, witty Raya (Francesca Faridany). Infuriated by Putin, driven by a love of her country, Raya cannot will herself to avert her gaze from abuse of power, however much safer that would be.
It is 2004, Putin is beginning his second term as president, and the climate for journalists in Russia is becoming more threatening. Raya has been reporting for years, not always legally, on the war in Chechnya. Yet she reflexively brushes off the worries of the people who care for her most: her ultra-responsible daughter, Galina (Olivia Deren Nikkanen), and her longtime editor, Kostya (Norbert Leo Butz).
Kostya has an affectionate, comic rapport with Raya, but he will turn out not to have nearly her guts. Still, when she pitches him a financial fraud exposé in the middle of the night (“Do not pitch me a story, I am barely sentient,” he objects, and this is true; he is wasted), he green-lights it. He also OKs her return to Chechnya for more war reporting.
As Raya is a multitasker, so is “Vladimir”: more ambitious and sprawling than practical and neat, but important stories require big swings, and Sheffer is taking one.
So there is Chovka (Erin Darke), a young Chechen woman who appears unbidden in Raya’s memories and dreams, tormenting her about the futility of her reporting and its possible harm to the Chechens whom she hopes she is humanizing. There is also Yevgeny (David Rosenberg), a financial analyst whom Raya coaxes into helping her with the fraud exposé, which involves a mysterious 20 million ruble tax refund, paid out even though it is flagrantly bogus.
“I’m sorry,” Yevgeny says, initially resisting, “when has getting involved in this country ever been anything other than a terrible idea?”
Timid, gentle, governed by fear, Yevgeny summons his bravery and becomes heroic. His macho American investor boss, Jim (Jonathan Walker), had urged him to act like a predator, not prey, but unlike Yevgeny, Jim crumples when faced with actual menace, emanating from the Russian state.
In the script, Sheffer writes that Raya is “partly inspired by Anna Politkovskaya,” the journalist and activist, who was poisoned in 2004 and murdered in 2006. Yevgeny, Sheffer notes, is “inspired by Sergei Magnitsky,” a tax lawyer who investigated a $230 million embezzlement scheme involving Russian officials and died in prison in 2009.
Those details might sound like spoilers, but the play is fictional. I mention them only to underline the stakes of “Vladimir” (and the wisdom of playwrights being upfront about their sources of inspiration).
Sheffer is also interested in mundane types of craven acquiescence that allow a brutal regime to maintain its hold. Take Kostya’s old college pal Andrei (Erik Jensen): a Kremlin employee with an influential job and enough charisma that you can see how he and Kostya have stayed friendly.
Surprisingly, they still have the capacity to disillusion each other — and when their anger erupts into a physical fight, they have a tussle that could happen only between middle-aged men who’ve known each other since they were, essentially, puppies. (Fight direction, excellent, is by Thomas Schall.)
The flip side of everyday cowardice is everyday boldness, and that is what Raya suspects could undermine the power of Putin, whom she calls a “little man” whose sole “talent is finding ugliness and knowing how to use it.”
Addressing an audience on a book tour to the United States, she suggests that “simple acts done by simple people” are a weapon against him and his ilk: to feel, to work, to hope, to fight.
“And it’s not deadly, this weapon,” she says. “But I think, I think … it’s very dangerous. Little men are very frightened of it.”
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