“Vladimir” is the second play in New York this year set in Russia decades ago at the beginning of the reign of Vladimir Putin. Opening tonight Off-Broadway, Erika Sheffer’s new play is similar in several ways to Peter Morgan’s “Patriots,” which ran on Broadway for two months in the Spring. Putin is not the central character in either play; indeed in “Vladimir,” he’s not even portrayed on stage. Instead, in both plays, the main character is based on a real-life figure who fell afoul of the Putin regime. In  “Patriots,” the central character was Boris Berezovsky, the actual name of an oligarch who took over the state-run television station. In “Vladimir,” the main character is named Raisa Bobrinskaya, known as Raya, and she is partly inspired by Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist who gained an international reputation two decades ago for her critical coverage of the war in Chechnya and life under Putin, persisting in her reporting despite injuries, official harassment, death threats, and worse.  

This same crusading Russian was also the subject of the 2018 play “Intractable Woman:  A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya,” written by  Italian playwright Stefano Massini (whose play “The Lehman Trilogy” later ran on Broadway.)

“Vladimir”  (like “Patriots”) is intelligently written and persuasively acted, with a seven-member cast led by the Broadway pros Francesca Faradany as Raya and Norbert Leo Butz as her editor Kostyra .  But (like “Patriots”) a New York theatergoer in 2024 might wonder: Why wade through the details of this old story right now?  One struggles to discern any but a surface connection with current events involving Russia.

Sheffer provides an answer both in a note in the program, and in several recent interviews. She first began contemplating “Vladimir”  during the American presidential campaign in 2016, when she was alarmed by the rise of extremism, violence, disinformation and “alternative facts” – and, finding it foreboding given what she knew of what her immigrant parents experienced back in Russia, she began reading about the rise of Putin “and the point at which society finds itself on the brink. Who chooses to fight and who stays silent?”

Knowing what the playwright had in mind, one might be able to view “Vladimir” as a cautionary tale for American democracy. However, the analogy is imperfect. The two nations have very different political traditions, as even the characters in the play implicitly acknowledge. When we first see Raya (Faridany), it is Election Night in Moscow in 2004 and she is complaining to her friend and editor, Kostya (Butz) because Putin had perpetuated a sham election.  Kostya urges her to calm down; she’s recovering from sprains and burns from her last trip to Chechnya.
“How can you ignore this brazen bullshit?” Raya says. 

“I don’t ignore it. But you’re acting like it’s a surprise— Come on, look, Ivan the Terrible, pretty bad. Peter the Great, actually terrible. Lenin! He didn’t bother with an election either. Stalin, Andropov, another KGB guy…”

“So, because it’s happened in the past, it makes it okay?”

“No, but it makes it predictable.”

In a cast of characters that wind up divided between those who fight and those who stay silent, we get clues from the get-go where these two will probably line up.  Raya is unquestionably a fighter. But Kostya is the more interesting character, precisely because he is more conflicted, and his journey more complicated.

At one point, we see him out on the town drinking with two old college buddies (The darkly gleaming and confusingly busy set design by Mark Wendland seems better suited for such scenes in clubs and restaurants than those supposed to take place in parks, apartments, or bookstores.) We eventually learn that one of his friends, Andrei (Erik Jensen) is now communications director at the Kremlin

Their friendship continues, but it’s fraught. Andrei tells Kostaya he considers Raya a traitor. Kostya defends her, and the work she’s doing. Andrei tells him his newspaper’s coverage of the election and the war “did not go unnoticed.” Kostya replies: “We haven’t printed anything that wasn’t true.” Andrei reacts dismissively. “Truth gets decided in hindsight. And every fifty years we all get to change our minds about it.”

This exchange, and the escalating interaction that follows through the play, serves as a vivid illustration of the impact of the political on the personal, and vice-versa – or, more precisely, the poisoning of relationships in an eroding democratic state.

Some of the other characters seem to exist primarily to illuminate Raya’s character. Her daughter Galina (Olivia Deren Nikkanen) is adamant that Raya stop risking her life, which shows how stubborn Raya is. Raya’s interaction with a Chechen rebel, Chovka (Erin Darke), highlights the unintended consequences of her singlemindedness.

But another character – in some ways the most intriguing – is at the center of Raya’s latest investigation, which takes up much of the play. The Russian Tax Authority had issued a tax refund of 20 million rubles to a small American company — “the largest tax refund in Russian history.” This would be suspicious enough, but the American company said they never got the money.

In search for answers, Raya goes to a bar to seek out an interview with Yevgeny (David Rosenberg,) the company’s tax auditor. At first, he doesn’t want to get involved. “I’m going to tell you what I told my boss: Don’t go looking for trouble, because it’s never good when you find it.” He’s learned to expect injustice and abuse, especially as a Jew in Russia. Later, we see Yevgeny with his American boss Jim (Jonathan Walker) who is such a hilariously over-the-top hard-charger that he’s screaming advice on the phone “you level him; you eat his guts with a goddam pair of chopsticks” – which turns out to be directed at his grade school son about a Little League game.  Not too surprisingly, then, Jim not only demands that Yevgeny get to the bottom of it, but urges him to be a lion, going so far as to force him to roar with him. 

What happens is startling and unexpected, unless you know Russian history. It’s all the more riveting because it is based on a true story.  The character of Yevgeny is inspired by a tax auditor named Sergei Magnitsky. If you do some Googling, you’ll find the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that authorizes the U.S. government to sanction those foreign government officials worldwide that have committed offenses against human rights. It was Russia’s effort to get the Magnitsky Act repealed that led to the infamous meeting between a Russian and Trump family members at Trump Tower  during the 2016 American presidential campaign  (the subject, more or less, of another play this year.) It’s admittedly roundabout, but the story of the Yevgeny character (after the events depicted in the play) is arguably the clearest direct connection in “Vladimir” to our messy American politics.

Vladimir
MTC at New York City Center Stage 1 through November 10
Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes including one ten-minute intermission
Tickets: $79 – $89
Written by Erika Sheffer
Directed by Daniel Sullivan
Scenic design by Mark Wendland, costume design by Jess Goldstein, lighting design by Japhy Weideman, original music and sound design by Dan Moses Schreier, projection design by Lucy Mackinnon, fight direction by Tom Schall , hair and wig design by Charles G. LaPointe, makeup design by Ashley Ryan, dialect coach Charlotte Fleck 
Cast: Norbert Leo Butz as Kostya, Erin Darke as Chovka and others, Francesca Faridany as Raya, Erik Jensen as Andrei and others, Olivia Deren Nikkanen as Galina and others , David Rosenberg as Yevgeny and Jonathan Walker as Jim and others
Photographs by Jeremy Daniel