Review: Mother Russia, a Comedy Adventure of Gangster Capitalism

In a February that has featured plays about AIDS, the Holocaust, and the Rwandan Genocide, I’m glad someone is still trying to make New York audiences laugh. In Mother Russia, Lauren Yee takes the admittedly rough straw of the post-Soviet economic transformation of Russia and spins it into comedic gold. Now making its New York debut at Signature Theatre, it features a top-notch cast of four in a surprise caper about the underhanded capture of state enterprise as Russia drunkenly stumbles into capitalism.

It’s 1992 and 25-year-old Evgeny (Adam Chanler-Berat, speaking in the stilted formality of a Chekhov translation that is for readers only) is a child of privilege adrift in the brave new world. The son of a high-ranking Communist, he had just started his own ascent in the party right as the Soviet Union collapsed. At the top of the play, he’s working for his father’s startup protection racket, and it’s obviously not going well.

Dmitri (Steven Boyer) was once a stable boy at Evgeny’s family dacha. Now also 25, he’s a shopkeeper embracing the free market. Evgeny has come to shake him down, but only Dmitri is armed with a gun, which he lowers when he recognizes his childhood friend. “What’re you doing back in St. Pete’s?,” he asks, sounding very much like an FSU frat boy (Boyer never lets us forget his stock character in this American burlesque of Russian history).

“EVGENY: Under capitalism, the prices are set by an ‘invisible hand.’
DMITRI: So they replaced YOU.
EVGENY: Yes.
DMITRI: With a HAND—
EVGENY: Yes.
DMITRI: —that’s INVISIBLE?!”

That should give you a sense of the quippy unvarnished exposition Yee employs to catch her audience up on this transformative period of Russian history, one that has certain unsettling parallels to our own. It’s unsubtle; it’s brazenly dumbed-down; it’s not very different from what Peter Morgan did in Patriots, but Yee actually intends to be funny.

And she succeeds thanks to an energetic staging by director Teddy Bergman that suggests a repertory production from the Moscow Art Theatre whipped together in less than 24 hours and under the heavy influence of cocaine. A Folgers ad (in Cyrillic) hangs above the proscenium stage, which is full of sliding painted backdrops and guarded by a slamming corrugated iron curtain (wonderfully artificial scenic design by dots). Sophia Choi outfits the two dudes in brightly colored 90s warm-up jackets, making them look like extras on the Russian knockoff of All That. Stacey Derosier’s lighting deploys follow spots and moody gels to enhance the highly theatrical tone. And Mikhail Fiksel underscores the transitions (and some of the more cartoonish scenes) with the sound of Russia in the ’90s, including a hilarious techno arrangement of fourth act of Swan Lake.

It’s a perfectly ridiculous setting for a totally ludicrous tale that involves Dmitri and Evgeny surveilling dissident Russian songstress Katya (Rebecca Naomi Jones, delivering the most recognizably human performance without sacrificing the play’s humor). A terrible spy, Evgeny falls in love with Katya, and this jeopardizes his father’s plot to amass enough vouchers to capture Russian state oil production and make himself one of the first oligarchs of the new Russia. In a time of great instability, guns, guts, and guile win the glory for all those shameless enough to grab it for themselves.

Presiding over it all is Mother Russia herself (David Turner dressed like a 1930s propaganda poster), who checks in frequently to tut-tut with her long and grim view of history. “I have been let down by so many shitty men,” she laments, knowing full well that the off-Broadway audience can relate. Turner perfectly captures the dour fatalism and bitter humor of a real Russian mom.

This delightfully silly buddy comedy keeps the audience laughing for a full 100 minutes, but between the jokes and pratfalls emerges a disturbingly relevant story for those of us whose white-collar jobs still afford us access to off-Broadway tickets. Slyly, Yee asks, “Aren’t you all a little bit like Evgeny, soon to be displaced not by an invisible hand but an artificial intelligence?” Like these characters, we too must brace for a new world as the most unscrupulous among us sharpen their knives and prepare to feast of the corpse of a dying empire.