Norbert Leo Butz (left) plays Kostya, the editor of a Russian newspaper that employs an indomitable journalist, Raya (Francesca Faridany), in Erika Sheffer’s play Vladimir.
The title of Erika Sheffer’s new play refers to the most famous Vladimir in the world at the moment—Russia’s president. Unlike Peter Morgan’s recent Patriots, however, Valdimir Putin doesn’t appear in Sheffer’s ambitious drama, although he casts a long shadow over the characters. Directed by Daniel Sullivan, the play, with its foreign setting and journalistic protagonists, shares a kinship with David Hare and Howard Brenton’s Pravda (1985)—it’s a worthy cousin to that work.
Accountant Yevgeny (David Rosenberg) gets a pep talk from Jim Kimball (Jonathan Walker), an American businessman.
Sheffer, like Hare and Brenton, focuses on journalists. Raisa, aka Raya (Francesca Faridany), is a tough investigative reporter in the mold of devil-may-care journalists like Hildy Johnson in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page (1928). Her counterpart is Kostya (Norbert Leo Butz), the editor of Moscow Novosti, a relatively liberal newspaper. The hard-drinking Kostya helps fund her work, and he is equally unsettled by Putin’s growing influence. But the similarities are mere echoes: Vladimir, though sometimes wryly humorous, is far darker than The Front Page.
On election night in Russia in 2004, Putin, to Raya’s dismay, is the overwhelming victor. She can’t resist a comment that seems pointedly familiar: “He ascends to the presidency like a fucking czar, and four years later he steals an election—can you imagine the nerve? I bet his dick is so small.”
The risks of being a journalist are shown immediately. Raya, her arm bandaged, has been covering the war against the rebels in Chechnya and is on medical leave. But she wants to cut it short:
Raya: It’s a sprained wrist, a couple of burns, I don’t need a month for that.
Kostya: It’s more than a sprained wrist, and you know it. If you’re sick of being at home, take a vacation, go sit on a beach somewhere.
Raya: Listen, I have been back from Chechnya for three weeks. I have been a very good girl, and it’s time to go back to work.
Raya and Yevgeny plan their next move in the investigation. Photographs by Jeremy Daniel.
Raya has reason for being eager to begin working again. She has a tip about an American banker who says his small investment firm was used by someone to claim a tax refund of 20 million rubles—“the largest tax refund in Russian history,” she tells Kostya. “That kind of money doesn’t get paid out unless someone at the top is getting a cut.”
Faridany is marvelous as the confident, hard-charging, gimlet-eyed Raya, navigating questions of loyalty, patriotism and freedom. Her skills and doggedness are at the fore as she approaches an accountant, Yevgeny (David Rosenberg), a Jew who knows how to pursue financial grifts, and in a masterly scene she gains his trust and enlists his help.
Kostya, meanwhile, weary of the constant struggle of publishing a paper, slowly slides into ineffectuality. “Has anything we’ve done made a difference? Has anything you’ve written altered a single trajectory?” he asks Raya. Alerted to coming press restrictions by his old schoolmate Andrei Kirov (a haughty Erik Jensen), a state television producer, Kostya takes a job with the government.
Sheffer’s play includes other threads—Yevgeny’s growing friendship with Jim Kimball (Jonathan Walker), the middle-aged American alpha male who complained about the loan but quickly rescinded his complaint. Kimball enlists Yevgeny to be his personal investigator.
Raya tries to calm her worried daughter Galina (Olivia Deren Nikkanen, left) as she prepares for her wedding.
Jim: Are you a fuckin’ zebra, Yevgeny? Or are you a lion?
Yevgeny: These are my choices?
Jim: Yeah.
Yevgeny: Okay. Then I am lion.
The investigation puts Raya in danger, but she survives a classic Putin maneuver on her life. She also resists the protests of her daughter Galina, a bride-to-be, to abandon her dangerous excursions; Galina resents Kostya for continuing to fund her mother’s trips. (There are also some surreal scenes involving a Chechen woman that are more intrusive than elucidating.)
Meanwhile, just months after Putin’s accession, Chechen terrorists attack a school in Russia, killing 333, including 186 children. Kostya learns from Andrei, the perfect soulless bureaucrat, that Putin’s administration knew about a coming attack.
As linchpin Raya, Faridany radiates determination and confidence in balancing the personal and political. Butz is a fireplug of a hero gone to seed yet still aware of right and wrong. Jensen’s Andrei is the epitome of a hollow apparatchik.
The drama plays out on Mark Wendland’s sterile sets: heavy on the gray and technological screens in the TV studios, and spare in the modernist apartment where Raya lives. In the final scene of this fascinating play, she and the unlikely hero Yevgeny are left standing alone, continents apart—each facing a life-changing dilemma.
Erika Sheffer’s Vladimir plays through Nov. 10 at Manhattan Theatre Club (131 West 55th St). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday and at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday (additional performance at 7 p.m. on Nov. 4); matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday (1 p.m. matinee Oct. 30). For tickets and more information, visit manhattantheatreclub.com.
Playwright: Erika Sheffer
Director: Daniel Sullivan
Scenic Design: Mark Wendland
Costume Design: Jess Goldstein
Lighting Design: Japhy Weideman
Original Music & Sound Design: Dan Moses Schreier
Projections: Lucy Mackinnon
