Near the beginning of Lauren Yee’s dark farce set in Russia after the collapse of Communism,  Evgeny (Adam Chanler-Berat) reunites with his old friend Dmitri (Steven Boyer), reminiscing fondly about once having to share the same piece of chewing gum, but now exclaiming together over a Filet-O-Fish from newly opened McDonald’s.

“Is this what capitalism tastes like?” Dmitri exults.

Actually, the taste is considerably more bitter, as we start learning right away in this clever, pointed comedy starring a crackerjack comic quartet.

It’s not just that Evgeny had to pawn some of his dead mother’s good silver and then wait three hours in line to get the sandwich.  Evgeny lost his job as a Communist bureaucrat in Moscow, and is back in St. Petersburg working for his father, who has transitioned from top Soviet official to mobster with a protection racket. Evgeny surprises Dmitri by confessing that he has come to Dmitri’s small shop to shake him down; he doesn’t really have what it takes to be one of his father’s menacing thugs, so he thought it might help to start with a friend. But Dmitri has his own surprise; the shop doesn’t sell anything. It’s a front for a clandestine surveillance business that Dmitri has started with a single client and a single target.

The main plot of “Mother Russia” is launched when Evgeny discovers who the target is: Katya (Rebecca Naomi Jones), a once-underground pop singer, the daughter of a dissident poet, who defected to the United States, and has now returned and become an ordinary schoolteacher. Evgeny was a huge fan; he begs Dmitri to hire him; he does so because he likes the idea of having an employee, a new concept in post-Soviet Russia. He takes to calling him his “shop servant.” Meanwhile, Evgeny graduates from simply listening to her humming while she brushes her teeth, to taking the same bus she takes on her way to work and back. It’s not long before Evgeny falls completely in love, although he doesn’t tell anybody, certainly not the person he’s spying on.  But initially suspicious of him when she notices his staring at her during their bus rides, she’s warmed enough to him to notice he is starting to dress better.

Katya: “Who is she? who’re you in love with?”
Evgeny: “… no one.”
Katya “You’re lying. you’re a terrible liar.”
Evgeny: i AM lying. yes, there is a girl.
Katya: and you like her?
Evgeny: i am devoted to her.
I know everything about her.
I know the sound of her footsteps.
I know how she likes her eggs, when she’s feeling tired.

One can view  “Mother Russia” through a political lens. Yee has said she sees it as connected to two of her previous plays, “Cambodian Rock Band,” (Cambodia during the 1970s genocide and thirty years later) and “The Great Leap,” ISan Francisco and Beijing in 1989) which both are also set in great national transitional periods  and explore the juxtaposition of Communism and popular culture. There is a title character in the play, Mother Russia (portrayed deliciously by David Turner as a red-garbed babushka), who embodies the country and offers observations about its history, sometimes directly, sometimes metaphorically: 

“You are only as happy as your unhappiest child and me? i have so many.and no matter what you do, they will never be happy.
‘why did you love so much?’
‘why did you feed me so much?’
‘why did you inform on our neighbors?’”

There are details in the play that drive home the personal (and self) betrayals inherent in a totalitarian society and the corrupting influence of capitalism; one can even parse the play as a timely analysis of the road toward authoritarian rule.  But “Mother Russia” is at its strongest not for its politics but its playfulness — the almost-slapstick routines between Boyer (Hand to God, Kimberly Akimbo) and Chanler-Berat (Next to Normal); the  chemistry between him and Jones, and the convoluted comic plot between the three of them, that ends up leaving a bitter taste, but is sweet on the way there.

Mother Russia
Signature Theater through March 15
Running time: 90 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $74 – $177
Written by Lauren Yee
Directed by Teddy Bergman 
Scenic design by Dots, costume design by Sophia Choi, lighting design by Stacey Derosier, sound design by Mikhail Fiksel, casting by Caparelliotis Casting, fight direction by UnkleDave’s Fight-House, and dialect coach Deborah Hecht. Production Stage Manager: Katie Ailinger.
 Cast: Steven Boyer as Dmitri, Adam Chanler-Berat as Evgeny, Rebecca Naomi Jones as Katya, and David Turner as Mother Russia