There’s an eponymous and ominous presence onstage at New York City Center Stage I. You can’t see him. But his evil, autocratic and tyrannical nature permeates every scene in Erika Sheffer’s riveting play, Vladimir, from the moment we see a drunk Boris Yeltsin resign to the play’s tragic ending. That man, of course, is Vladimir Putin, the former KGB agent, who, after being appointed acting president, seized power and never let go.
Francesca Faridany and Norbert Leo Butz
Produced by Manhattan Theatre Club and directed by Daniel Sullivan, with an appropriately dark and adaptable set by Mark Wendland, Vladimir is a play for our times. Not just because of what it reveals about Russia but also because of what it tells us about our own United States.
Raya Bobrinskaya (Francesca Faridany) is a reporter, recently returned from Chechnya, who believes it is her personal responsibility to bring Putin down. When she asks her longtime editor Kostya (Norbert Leo Butz) to back her investigation of a 20 million ruble tax refund that has all the earmarks of fraud, he urges her to forget it.
Francesca Faridany and Norbert Leo Butz
Raya, however, refuses to take Kostya’s well-meaning advice. She resists the pleas of her daughter, Galina (Olivia Deren Nikkanen), who begs her mother not to put herself in harm’s way. Even her close brush with death when she is poisoned by her enemies cannot turn her around.
If Kostya won’t help her (he eventually agrees to work for the Kremlin), Raya finds an alternate ally in Yevgeny (David Rosenberg), who starts off as a timid Jewish financial analyst who has spent his life watching his back and not making waves and ends up catching Raya’s crusading spirit.
Francesca Faridany and David Rosenberg
Kostya does manage to save his skin, but he loses his soul. His verbal sparring and physical altercations with his college friend, Andrei (Erik Jensen), an influential man at the Kremlin, reveal his ambivalence.
Although the play is fictional, Raya was inspired by the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was poisoned in 2004 and murdered in 2005, and Yevgeny was inspired by the tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison in 2009. So it should not be surprising that Vladimir does not end happily.
Faridany and Butz have a natural chemistry that adds tremendous poignancy to their plight. But it is Rosenberg who provides the emotional core of this play. His soulful portrayal of a man caught between conscience and family, fear and outrage tell us the truth about courage. No one is born a hero. We become heroes through the choices we make and the sacrifices we accept.
photos by Jeremy Daniel
Vladimir
Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center, Stage 1, 131 West 55 St.
2 hours and 15 minutes including one intermission
ends on November 10, 2024
for tickets, call 212-581-1212 or visit NY City Center