Russian literature can be intimidating. It serves up dense, voluminous tomes filled with lots of suffering and names you might not be able to pronounce. But this summer The Old Globe Theatre has commissioned "Crime and Punishment: A Comedy." That's right. Dostoevsky reimagined as a rollicking comic outing.
Globe artistic director Barry Edelstein was so pleased with what Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen accomplished reimagining "A Christmas Carol" as "Ebenezer Scrooge’s BIG San Diego Christmas Show" that he commissioned them to tackle another work of classic literature.
Dostoevsky's original story involves impoverished student Rodion Raskolnikov who decides to commit a murder to improve his circumstances but then suffers moral anguish for the crime. The stuff of comedy, right?
"We looked for what we thought was the grimmest and most serious piece of literature," said director and co-playwright Gordon Greenberg. "Because the more seriously something takes itself, the easier it is to send it up. So that was our way in."
Co-playwright Steve Rosen agreed.
"'Crime and Punishment,' even the title, feels like 'eat your vegetables,'" Rosen said. "There's a sense about it that seems so dramatic that it seemed like it was daring us to make fun of it or to find humor in it. And it was fun to explore because the situations that this person finds himself in, the red tape he has to go through, the bureaucracy that he's got to jump through and deal with — it's not very different than what we deal with today, at the DMV or dealing with our taxes, and so finding parallels between the humorous inconveniences that we face today, even on that sort of smaller level, and applying them into this world, it was a fun challenge."
The play is staged in the round with a handful of actors playing dozens of roles.
"It lives somewhere between Saturday Night Live and the Royal Shakespeare Company," Greenberg offered.
The play serves up carefully choreographed chaos.
"We have a tremendous company of actors who are working together as a team," Rosen added. "Because it isn't just about, we're going to do this scene, and then we go off stage. It is that we're going to go in this scene, and then as soon as it ends, I have to grab that chair, put that here, hand this person a mustache, and then we're into the next section. So there is a great deal of choreography that has to happen in order for this to look the way that it does."
For both Greenberg and Rosen, Dostoevsky's novel was something they initially avoided. Greenberg turned to Cliff Notes at school while Rosen read the Classics Illustrated version. Yet there was something in the story that spoke to them.
"Maybe it was my great great grandparents' Russian backgrounds, and the sense of Eastern European despair and figuring out how to find hope on the other side of trauma and difficulty," Greenberg explained. "I mean, these are people who are facing abject poverty and physical decrepitude and all kinds of challenges. And ultimately, in Dostoevsky's version, I think he looked to religion to be the answer, a certain spirituality that comes through the character of Sonia in the book. And in our adaptation, we've taken some of the same core ideas but translated them into what amounts to a pretty new story. So it's really a riff on 'Crime and Punishment' as opposed to a straight up adaptation."
The play also incorporates other Dostoevsky novels as well as references to Chekov's plays.
"Everything but the kitchen sink," Greenberg said. "However, I should say not to sell this short, that this really does take the core of what that book was about and manifests it in a new version of the narrative that speaks to the idea that human experience is the same and that the ideas and challenges that the characters were facing then are still very much alive. The idea of moral relativity, the idea of justifying for ourselves the way we live — passing by an unhoused person on the street and being able to just walk right by and understand that there are certain inequities in life, and somehow we convince ourselves that this is the fair and just way to live."
Rosen's brother is the one who made him see how the themes in the novel were still relevant and that the times we live in now are not so different than the times Dostoevsky wrote about.
"Dostoevsky was saying things that I still identify with today," Rosen said. "We all know perfectly nice people in our lives who we've always sort of seen eye to eye with ideologically. And then something happens in their lives where they start making moral and ethical compromises to explain a point of view that probably before that point they were not so comfortable with or would have found abhorrent. And they begin acts of mental and ethical gymnastics worthy of Nadia Comăneci in order to make it all make sense in their world."
"Crime and Punishment: A Comedy" runs through August 20 at The Old Globe’s theater-in-the-round. And both playwrights offered multiple puppet warnings, which only makes me more curious about what this madcap reimagining of Dostoevsky will be about.
