Let’s be blunt regarding Vladimir, a new play that opened on Tuesday in its world premiere production by Manhattan Theatre Club: It’s a dud.
Vladimir is an earnest fictional drama about a courageous Russian journalist who strives to report facts over fake news in 2004. Unlike last season’s Patriots, the character of Vladimir Putin never actually appears during this two-act play. Its title, however, has been designed into the setting to hover above the action to represent how the omnipresent president of Russia influences these sad doings.
After a sardonic prologue that regrettably proves to be unlike the drama to come, the story begins with its key characters, Raya (Francesca Faridany) and Kostya (Norbert Leo Butz), acknowledging that the Russian government and its state-run media are corrupt. Two mostly dull hours later, the play ends with the characters acknowledging the Russian government and its state-run media are corrupt, only worse than they expected.
Raya, the journalist, shuttles between Chechnya, where she reports about its ongoing guerrilla warfare, and Moscow, where she investigates an inexplicable disappearance of 20 million rubles within the bureaucracy. Raya cultivates secret information sources among rebels and bean-counters even as Kostya, her close friend and editor, eventually sells out to accept a cushy post with state-run media.
Their friendship is ruined but not before – oh, why bore you any more than this play bored me? Vladimir never comes to life in spite of playwright Erika Sheffer’s sincere, cautionary intentions to hold up early 2000s Russia as a cracked mirror in which to view America’s possible future should bad government prevail here. The trouble is that Sheffer’s circular, sorrowful story mechanically employs hackneyed figures – a valiant reporter, a roistering editor, a timid bureaucrat, a sharp American executive, a chilly party bigwig, and so on – to tell a fairly well-informed Manhattan Theatre Club audience something they probably already know.
The only surprise is that Vladimir turns out to be such a lousy play, since Sheffer has crafted far better ones. In 2012, The New Group premiered Sheffer’s Russian Transport, a vivid realistic drama regarding a nice family in the Russian-American community in Brooklyn whose shady visiting cousin takes over their lives. The inert quality of Sheffer’s latest work indicates that its substance is derived more from books and second hand accounts than inspiration or experience; the drama “smells of the lamp,” as the old Roman saying goes.
Capable actors can go only so far on such flat material. Francesca Faridany aptly communicates Raya’s stubborn sense of persistence. Norbert Leo Butz animates Kostya with vodka-infused high spirits. David Rosenberg’s tragic financial analyst and Jonathan Walker’s strong-jawed American are other notable performances among the seven-member company, some of whom portray several roles.
Making full use of the wide, deep theater space at New York City Center Stage 1, director Daniel Sullivan and set designer Mark Wendland provide some cool, glossy, fluent visuals that situate Raya’s apartment and other locations within a television studio replete with cameras, lighting rigs, video screens and similar media gear meant to suggest the false, manipulative nature of the current Russian government.
Vladimir opened October 15, 2024, at City Center Stage I and runs through November 10. Tickets and information: manhattantheatreclub.com
