Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Not so long ago, Peter Morgan’s play, Patriots, featured an account of how a Russian oligarch named Boris Berezovsky helped raise Vladimir Putin to power and lived to regret it. Putin, played by Will Keen, was a formidable presence. In Erika Sheffer’s Vladimir (now playing at Manhattan Theater Club’s off-Broadway space at City Center), Putin manages to be a formidable presence without making an appearance onstage. His existence outside our view is enough to poison the atmosphere.

Sheffer has changed some names to give herself the freedom fictionalization offers, but some of the characters in her play indeed have direct correlation to real Russian journalists and sources who tried to raise the alarm about Putin during his rise. The real-life counterparts were dispatched with breathtaking brutality. (If you follow the news, you know his adversaries have continued to meet not-unexpected deaths.)

Under the direction of Daniel Sullivan (one of our most consistently excellent directors), Francesca Faridany, David Rosenberg and Norbert Leo Butz play the three principal figures hoping to use journalism to call Putin and his colleagues to account. Though this is a grim story, Sheffer and Sullivan find frequent occasions for laughs (particularly in an opening scene in which a drunken Boris Yeltsin improvises a gross solution to a pressing need to pee seconds before a live broadcast). This keeps the show consistently entertaining even as it gets increasingly distressing.

Anyway, to finish off the advice part of this piece – yes, Vladimir is a valuable new play being given the kind of elegant production we expect from Manhattan Theater Club, and I recommend it strongly.

In the wake of seeing it, though, I wasn’t thinking about the quality of a theatrical event. I was thinking about how Putin and his cronies murdered journalists to keep them from bringing the truth to the Russian people. And I was thinking about how American journalists don’t believe themselves to be in serious physical danger delivering the truth about Donald Trump. As far as I know, nobody has tried to poison Rachel Maddow’s tea. No, an army of American journalists have been able to use a variety of print and broadcast platforms to explicitly describe how Donald Trump is and how unfit he is to be given responsibility again. Part of what is dismaying is that, even with unfettered access to the truth about Trump (who, of course, is friendly with and sympathetic to Putin, and probably envies him, too), close to half of the American people are prepared to vote for him anyway. They see he’s declining mentally and they hear him using language that would have gotten candidates from an earlier age exiled into disgrace, and they shrug it off. Putin feels he has to murder his critics. Trump is confident that enough people will ignore the facts that he hasn’t resorted to Putin’s methods.

And that, not the excellence of the play I saw, is what stayed with me on the bus ride home.