The easiest lesson to glean from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel
Crime and Punishment is that if you’re a penniless intellectual
living in a poorly insulated garret in St. Petersburg, Russia, and you
decide to axe-murder a miserly pawnbroker for her money, don’t go
murdering her innocent sister, too. And if you do happen to murder both
of them, don’t say that you were wholly justified in the case of the
pawnbroker, and that the sister was — oops, kind of an accident,
my bad. And if you do justify one murder and apologize for the other,
then don’t go comparing yourself to Napoleon, saying that it’s okay to
axe-murder one social parasite if you plan to use the spoils for a
better cause (like, say, burying them under a rock).
The easiest lesson to glean from Berkeley Rep’s new production of
Crime and Punishment, directed by Sharon Ott based on the
adaptation by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus, is that Dostoyevsky’s
600-page morality tale can indeed be encapsulated in ninety minutes
with no intermission. Also, doors make really awesome set pieces when
you paint them blue and stack them around the stage.
Compression is the operating principle here, not only time-wise but
space-wise. The stage is enclosed by two huge walls, each comprised of
about twenty blue doors that are stacked together cheek-by-jowl. It’s
not exactly clear what type of portal symbolism the set designers were
going for (Liberation? The perilous unknown?) but the effect is one of
a blue wall caving in. Only three characters populate this version of
the play, each of whom represents a theme rather than a flesh-and-blood
person. Raskolnikov, played chillingly by Tyler Pierce, is the
protagonist with the Napoleon complex, who commits murder as an
intellectual exercise. Sonia (Delia MacDougall) is the self-abnegating
prostitute next door who becomes Raskolnikov’s one-way spiritual
advisor. The Porfiry (played by J.R. Horne as a jocular, Santa
Claus-ish character) is the one who ultimately casts judgment, after
subjecting Raskolnikov to a brittle cross-examination. But he also
offers the road to redemption.
Naturally, we lose some of Crime and Punishment‘s plot twists
with the new configuration, but it creates a lot of dramatic tension.
Campbell and Columbus obviously know what shortcuts to take for maximum
impact. The script uses recurring symbols and lines (i.e., the
Porfiry’s question, “Do you believe in Lazarus rising from the dead?”)
to underscore the god/man/mortality/redemption subtext. Their Crime
and Punishment has a Memento-like structure, beginning with
an interrogation, recounting the crime in a fragmented way, and
creating a paranoid sense of time running out. There are no discernible
scenes (from an audience perspective, at least) — rather,
characters scuttle in and out of the various doors to interact with
Raskolnikov, who stays on stage for the entire play.
Thus, the stage not only becomes a physical prison (in the form of
an interrogation room or a cramped apartment) — it’s also a
prison of denial, and a visual representation of Raskolnikov’s mind. At
one point, he breaks the third wall and appeals to the audience, asking
us to either condemn or exonerate him. He asks if one crime — the
murder of a spiteful, horrible, sadistic old woman — could be
wiped out by thousands of good deeds. What those “good deeds” are
remains open to interpretation, but moral ambiguity was Dostoyevsky’s
intent. Raskolnikov is a sympathetic character because he’s desperate
and irrational, not because his line of reasoning makes any sense.
Pierce is creepy as the play’s moral compass, although his acting
gets eclipsed by Horne, who has exactly the right mix of pity and scorn
to play Dostoyevsky’s Porfiry. (Granted, he also gets all the best
lines.) MacDougal is an aggregate of all the female roles (virtuous
Sonia, the sadistic pawnbroker, and her pathetic sister Lizaveta, none
of whom comes across as particularly likeable. Yet, between the two
male actors we get a real harrowing sense of the murderer’s
psychology.
Dostoyevsky’s original Crime and Punishment was pretty
specific to 19th-century Russia, and the ideas he engaged (about the
dangers of abandoning faith for rationalism) might ring hollow to a
non-19th century Russian — or, for that matter, anyone other than
a literature major. But many aspects of the play would resonate with a
modern audience, especially in a new era of desperation and scarcity.
(Watch how many people nod their heads when Raskolnikov complains about
his apartment being unbearably cold in the winter, and unbearably hot
in the summer — but always unbearable.) Not to mention it’s
always fun to see two people get murdered with an axe.
