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Photo by Richard Anderson.
In Walt Spangler’s striking set for Center Stage’s production of Crime and Punishment, the stage’s most obvious marker is a staircase. It heads from the floor of Raskolnikov’s garret and disappears into the eaves of the Head Theater.
The production, directed by Jason Loewith, and adapted by Curt Columbus and Marylin Campbell, is a soft, slow approach to Dostoevsky’s novel, in which the famous crowd of characters is compressed into an intimate, understated three person play. The bare staircase hovers over the production.
Compression here breeds intimacy, but not intensity. Raskolnikov (Eric Feldman) is a navel gazer, a grad school dropout who finds himself dealing with his world by visualizing himself as the axis upon which it turns. His ruminations are delusional brain farts, punctuated by spasms of irritability and frustrated anger. If there were violent video games back then, or automatic weapons at the corner store, he’d be someone to watch out for.
The light shines largely on Raskolnikov. The other characters circulate around him like distant planets. They become even blurrier because actors Lauren Culpeper and John Thompson don several roles apiece. So the cool-cucumber Porfiry transitions suddenly into the hapless drunk Marmeladov. Sonia, the angelic slut, becomes Alyona, the miserly loan shark.
His two main foils, however, are Sonia (Culpeper), the prostitute who sells herself to support her family and her doomed, alcoholic father. And Porfiry (Thompson), the archetypal embodiment of the good-cop/bad-cop police investigator, who ultimately entangles Raskolnikov into his own tangled web of self-deception.
Loewith is determined, it appears, to have Feldman and company avoid the Dostoevskian cliché: the wild-eyed Russian monomaniac driven by existential angst. Because this production places the hard focus on the subdued interrogation, the climactic axe murder — when Raskolnikov kills a pawnbroker who doesn’t deserve to live — is almost an afterthought. The impoverished student, as the show’s poster hints, seems to spend more time musing on the cockroaches than on Nietzsche.
It’s a low-key, highly respectful adaptation of the novel, and Curt Columbus and Marilyn Campbell did well to use the interrogation of Raskolnikov as the engine of this production. The young murderer begins the play assured that his alibi is airtight, but conversations with the gentlemanly Porfiry windup getting the better of him. As standing doors and trap doors open and close, the scene becomes a living embodiment of Raskolnikov’s mind. The principle character searches relentlessly for an escape, and the staircase/ladder hovers above him as a taunting reminder of the heights he intended to reach.
The set design is adventurous, ultimately, the production approaches Dostoevsky’s novel tempered with restraint. Restraint, of course, is not a word you’d usually associate with Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky’s novel is a crucible of self-doubt and self-love, and his characters create themselves on the battlefield.
Adapting a novel — especially Crime and Punishment — is a risky business. Even in an armchair, this novel as something you climb without knowing where you’re headed, or whether you’ll get to the top. The closest Center Stage got to tackling a classic novel, in my limited experience, was in 2001, with Rinde Eckhart’s “And God Created Great Whales.” (David Schweitzer, who directed that memorable production, directed “Snow Falling on Cedars,” which I unfortunately missed.) In that production, Eckhart didn’t try to reproduce Moby Dick; he tried to wrestle with it.
Maybe it’s just that Americans are a little too polite to wrestle with Dostoevsky. That’s understandable. He’s scary-looking and the novel itself is scary-looking. So maybe by default, the focus is on an iconic main character, who wanders the stage with the novel itself as a vague panoramic background. Dostoevsky’s smaller characters in this production get shunted aside as window dressing.
Watching this production, I was reminded how important that those characters actually are. His anti-heroes – streetwalkers, drunks, and petty demons — are not meant to stand in the background. They’re this novel’s prize creations. Raskolnikov recreates himself by locking himself in combat with each one. Those battles — even with the lovely Sonia — are fought to the bitter end. When he emerges at the end, he really is Lazarus risen from the land of the dead.
Lazarus gets cited often enough in this production, but I’m not sure he rises from the dead. The main character floats in a state of modern spiritual limbo. By the end, he gets saved from his own indecisive cul-de-sac. It’s a little like watching a good friend get religion. It’ll be better for him, probably, but, before the baptism gets finalized, how about one more night on the town?
A year or so ago, when Studio Six’s Itsy Bitsy Spider came into town, we had a peek at Dostoevsky as staged through Russian director Alexei Marin’s eyes. In essence, the production did battle with the novel The Possessed: it focused on the one chapter that Dostoevsky ultimately left out of the novel; it defied our own canonical interpretations, and forced Dostoevsky into a viscerally charged landscape of sexual desire. Dostoevsky himself, I’m sure, would have got up and left. Several audience members did.
Staging any novel is a challenge, and the novel Crime and Punishment is a messy, rude, in-your-face challenge. As Raskolnikov reminds us, you can only climb as far as you’re willing to fall. This cerebral production has its charms — and treats the Russian master with respect — but it chooses to stay on the safe side. Dostoevsky’s ladder, as Spangler reminds us, heads farther up than most of us are willing to go. This likable, but mellow, Raskolnikov, and the production itself, avoid the perils — and pleasures — of vertigo .
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