Props, as the Russians say, to Lookingglass Theatre for taking on The Brothers Karamazov, the Big Kahuna of 19th Century literature. You have to admire the sheer audacity of the whole project: how do you shape Dostoevsky's thousand-page treatise on the most fundamental quandaries of human existence into a compelling theatrical experience, and also provide a narrative arc that an audience will want to follow? Director/adapter Heidi Stillman and her cast throw themselves at the text with full force and guns blazing, and the result is impressive and enjoyable in equal measures (assuming, that is, that you have a taste for epic literary grandiloquence. The Russians do many things, but subtlety is not one of them).
Fyodor Karamazov's sons are Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha, and you can spend your whole life arguing about what the three might represent. Dmitri (Joe Sikora) is the brashest, all carnal impulsiveness and histrionic torment. Ivan (Philip R. Smith), who internalizes his despair, is the brainy aesthete who has reasonably deduced that God doesn't exist (Ivan concludes, famously, that the absence of God means that everything is allowable). Alyosha (Doug Hara), perhaps the most purely good character in all of literature, is charged with navigating the terrain between his brothers and their father (the wonderfully energizing Craig Spidle).
All three actors offer powerful, nuanced performances and ably inhabit the huge range of emotions that their characters experience over the course of the novel. They’re matched by Louise Lamson’s Katerina and Chaon Cross’s Grushenka, the by turns obsessive and manipulative as women who seem to anticipate every move the Karamazov boys make.
Stillman does an admirable job distilling the plot of the novel (murder, sex, family intrigue), but I was especially glad that she chose to include the more philosophical parts of the book, too—particularly ingenious is the staging of the Grand Inquisitor scene, a parable that Ivan relates to Alyosha that imagines the catastrophe that befalls Christ when he chooses to return to earth during the heart of the Inquisition in Medieval Spain. The story cuts right to the heart of the Dostoevsky's message about the limits of human freedom. By imbuing her staging with theatrical ingenuity, and instilling a passion for the material in her actors, Stillman presents us with an exhilarating affirmation of the relevance of Dostoevsky’s message to our own lives.
Reviewed by Centerstage!
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