Crime and Punishment

Or: Lazarus in Gehenna

It is a place of ashes. The remnants of a place atomized by fire or ground down by the passing centuries, where nothing survives but truth. Nothing exists but two chairs, a fallen door, an ash heap supporting a waiting ax and the crunching footsteps of the Furies. This is the world, the private hell, of Rodion Raskolnikov (Daniel Stompor), in Jeffery Mosser’s production of Crime and Punishment, adapted by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus, the place of a young man lost in the slums of St. Petersburg, wasted and worthless in his own eyes, and mired in a particularly grizzly double murder, and tormented by the angles or demons of Detective Porfiry Petrovich (Matthew Bentley) and Sonia Marmeladova (Tayana Arevena-Getzinger).

The adaption, the action, even Gabrielle Chabot’s set is all filled down to a cutting point (Roskolnikov’s Gehenna is not paying lip service to minimalism, but is so reduced because it needs nothing). Campbell and Columbus have boiled away the novel, and most of the far flung characters, to give us the core of the murder and Raskolnikov’s suffering; stitching and looping scenes together in a mobius ribbon. Sometimes the eerie repetition of interrogation (disassembling and restoring the matryoshka dolls of the story) and transformations from one scene to another arouse fascination but bring confusion along for the date. Mosser contain and harnesses this effect by roping the audience into the performance. Placing us in the round, we become the bell jar trapping the young student inside, the humming electric fence that keeps him caged, our amperage controlled by Grover Hollway’s aural ghosts of mocking church bells and deaths-head balalaikas. The effect may cause stress to introduce your shoulders to your earlobes but it keeps the action alive and the attention riveted.

Though the crime itself lacks a certain brutality (its ax blows as well as punches pulled), the moral questions, the acidic pickling of Raskolnikov are fresh and fleshed and delicious. Stompor’s hopelessness is an ever varied thing: he shivers, quivers, or stands straight, racked with the cramps or itches of his conscious and self loathing. Though sometimes overly racked and contorted by paroxysms of mental anguish, skating over a moment he keeps himself wetted with a child-like pain; trying to put together the pieces of a broken world. In age of mass murderers, Roskolnikov's s snowballing despair perfectly captures what another young, troubled, dissident said: “We kill others so that when we die they will have meant less then us.”

His ministering demons (or avenging angels) slip their skins (via Chabot’s unchanging but ever changeable costumes) to become the players of the case, but always circle back to the two slowly circling, gravel-souled, blank faced judges. Bentley, as the investigating inspector and primary antagonist, plays a deep game of unnerving charm. His Porfiry loves Raskolnikov, his mind, his manner, the challenge of the case; loves him as he would an elder brother, or a really smart dog. His open, earnest attitude and nervous smile as he tickles out of his quarry’s views on Moral Philosophy, all bear the signs of him a man painfully anxious for attention. And then without turning a hair or flickering that embarrassed smile a jot, he’ll plunge a hook of a question, and you can almost see the genteel devil in his eyes, killing his quarry with kindness.

As Sonia, Arevena-Getzinger gives a masterful act of inhabitation and simplicity. Forced by poverty into a life of negotiable affection, Sonia retains an unshakeable belief in G-d, and while both the poverty or the faith might have portrayed in broad strokes, she keeps them as integral parts of personality, as essential as breathing, while also showing herself as a woman who will take none of Raskolnikov’s nonsense on the other cheek; to her he may indeed be as worthless as he says he is, but he is by no means unworthy. Two moments of truly splendid acting, of showing off her hand at Sonia’s gentle Jelks-ishness blaze in memory: hen Sonia recites the story of Lazarus, her diffidence overcome by radiance as she is transported by the hope provided in the words, and when, finally coaxing Raskolinkov’s confession, she unpins her feelings and seizes his face with a smile and kiss. It is a moment, an incandescent coup that embodies one of the scripts thesis, the whole point of this eternal ashland: forgiveness, and redemption, can be the most painful punishment of all.