Review by Ron Fassler . . .
In describing the place and time of her comedic play Mother Russia, playwright Lauren Yee writes: “Our story take place in fall 1992. St. Petersburg, Russia, which is now Leningrad, which is now actually BACK to being called St. Petersburg again.” A period that marked three years since the Berlin Wall came down; the dissolution of the Soviet Union came a year later. Yee’s premise for her play is how do three Russians—two men and a woman—search for meaning post-Mikhail Gorbachev’s new world vision. In 1996, the less-than-steady Boris Yeltsin took the helm for eight years. Then came Vladimir Putin, who has kept the job twenty-six years with no end in sight. The persistent pain and suffering of the Russian people never knowing who to trust become comedic fodder in this peculiar production presented by Signature Theatre. The laughs for which it vies are more strained than natural and only its ninety-minute length separates it from being a wholly leaden experience.
Originally commissioned by the Lincoln Center Theater (did it pass on doing a full production?), Mother Russia’s world premiere came about a year ago at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. The show’s title character in that production was played by a woman. Here, she is personified by David Turner in drag, embodying the symbolic role of narrator with the required panache. However, Turner is ultimately undone by a succession of monologues that predictably make the same points rat-a-tat-tat over and again. The two main characters, Dmitri (Steven Boyer) and Evgeny (Adam Chanler-Berat), wrapped in a continual battle to make sense of their lives in the new republic, are too paper-thin to make you care if either of them will ever earn a decent living wage. And when Evgeny, at the request of Dimitri, is called upon to spy on Katya (Rebecca Naomi Jones), a young Russian woman with a mysterious past, it isn’t long before Evgeny falls hopelessly in love with her. The thick stew produced is bland; stirred heavily in Yee’s writing.
That such a serious topic is played for wild comedy is not impossible to pull off. Christopher Durang possessed a comedic flair that often made such taboo subjects as alcoholism, murder, and incest uproarious. Same goes for Paul Rudnick and a host of playwrights up to the task. Tone is everything and Teddy Bergman’s uninspired direction seems of little help to Yee. Dots, credited with scenic design, is not up to their usual standards, though I’m not sure that the way the play is set up there’s any design that would totally satisfy. Sophia Choi’s costumes make sense and the lighting by Stacey Derosier is effective.
Except for the character of Mother Russia, who speaks like a Russian for whom English is a second language, none of the other actors use accents. This is per the playwright’s instructions in the text that the threesome should speak with standard American accents, which feels like an odd choice. If it’s to make the story feel more universal, it can’t because all of it is so specifically wed to Russia in 1992. And by making them seem more American, we are taken out of the action. Again, decisions like these throughout can only be assumed are deliberate, even when they defy a certain logic.
The actors are certainly game. Chanler-Berat and Jones, who appeared together off Broadway in I Can Get It for You Wholesale in 2023, work diligently to make sense of things and Steven Boyer, so good in Hand to God and Kimberly Akimbo, tries to imbue Dimitri with things other than idiocy and cravenness, but that’s basically all he’s given to play. Turner steals all the scenes he’s in because he’s outside the goings-on commenting on them and doesn’t have to play his part in the unworkable plot, a great deal of which I’ve purposely spared recapping.
I should mention that the preview I attended was not devoid of laughs. I’m a pushover for comedies and I wish I was among those laughers, but too little of it amused me. With Mother Russia billed as “a comedy of love and survival,” all I can say is I didn’t feel the love . . . though I did manage to survive it.
Mother Russia is playing now through March 15th at the Signature Theatre’s Romulus Linney Theatre, 480 W 42 Street, NYC. For information on tickets, please click here.
Photos by HanJie Chow.
Headline photo: David Turner as the title role in Mother Russia.
