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Crime and Punishment - Intiman Theatre
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Intiman Theatre - Crime and Punishment
April 3 - May 3, 2009
Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus have adapted Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel to form a 90 minute play. Previously performed at the Capitol Hill Arts Center in 2007, the three actors take on an enormous workload - all in different ways. Galen Joseph Osier plays an impoverished student, Raskolnikov, who harbours grandiose philosophies about the nature of good and evil, and crime and punishment. He postulates a theory about the world being populated by two types of men; "the ordinary" and "the extraordinary". The former are followers. They follow rules, and they follow "the extraordinary". However, the latter group, in which Raskolnikov hints at including himself, as well as Napoleon Bonaparte, are above the law, and may act freely of the constraints that bind other men. He once wrote an article about them but never got paid. In fact, there are doubts he ever knew it was published.
Bereft of any props bar three chairs, Osier has to portray a range of emotions in an unbroken ninety minutes during which he rarely leaves the stage. He has to portray a man sliding from idealism into insanity by way of self-delusion and his only props are his lines, and his fellow cast members.
Into this mix comes Todd Jefferson Moore's Inspector Porfiry. In contrast to the irrational and unstable Raskolnikov, Porfiry is a calm but inquisitive policeman whose world is the one of the logical, one of evidence and of its resultant conclusions. However, in order to obtain the confession and conviction of the insane student, Porfiry delves into his psyche and philosophy.
The two are fine actors but there are two hindrances to this being pulled off with total success. One is simply the lack of time. The whole play lasts ninety minutes and the interaction between Raskolnikov and Porfiry is allocated barely a third of that. Secondly, there is not quite enough chemistry between the two. That is nobody's fault. Sometimes there is and sometimes there isn't. Porfiry is a fine actor and carries off his detective role well. Osier, in portraying mental instability, occasionally descends into over-dramatization and occasionally the two seem to be talking beyond each other rather than to each other. I didn't detect any gradual unraveling of Raskolnikov's mental veil before the Inspector's eyes, and there was a touch of inevitability about the direction the play was taking, which made it hard to regard as a suspense thriller.
The third cast member is Hanna Lass. She assumes four roles, Raskolnikov's mother, a prostitute Sonya, the evil pawnbroker and her put upon sister. Without the aid of a change of wardrobe to greater illustrate which is which, Lass has to work very hard to establish identity to the audience before too much dialogue is missed. In this, she is successful on all but a few occasions, with the prostitute and the pawnbroker's sister occasionally hard to distinguish as early in the scene as the less deductive viewer may need. The part like Galen Osier's is hard work and Hanna Lass is unfailingly hard working in keeping her head above water.
It would be fair to say that much of the play takes place inside Raskolnikov's mind, a dark and troubled place with many voices. The scenery mimics this well, and this is one of the highlights of the work. The mirroring of the complex nature of his mind, by the opening and closing of doors on the stage, is well done and the Associate Director Sheila Daniels does well not to waste any of the ninety minutes. I can’t escape the conclusion though that the more open high roofed auditorium does not quite lend itself to this work as readily as the smaller confines at CHAC, because there is very little wrong with “Crime and Punishment”, and one struggles really to pinpoint a reason why this isn’t magnificent. It’s more than possible that this is one of those rare plays that you may have to see twice to totally comprehend and I haven’t ruled out another visit with the possibility of writing a fresh review if I get an “AHA” moment.
This reviewer is very fond of the Intiman Theater and its work and can honestly say, I've never seen anything less than outstanding there. So I do set high standards for the Intiman, and this didn't quite reach the peaks of the Diary of Anne Frank. It may benefit from some tweaking, but if anything was lacking, it wasn't for lack of effort and as they may say in some sports, the degree of difficulty was very high. I'd still recommend Crime and Punishment as being well worth a night out. You never know. You may decide it’s worth two."
Tickets are available from www.intiman.org or 206.269.1900. Tickets range in price from $40 to $55, with discounts available for youth, seniors and groups. Patrons 25 and under can purchase tickets to any performance for $10. Pending availability, rush tickets will be sold 15 minutes before curtain for $20. Intiman will offer two pay-what-you-can performances (with a $5 minimum per ticket): Wednesday, April 1 and Sunday, April 5, both at 7:30 pm. There will be four student matinees during the run. This production is sponsored by the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs and 4Culture.
Intiman Associate Director Sheila Daniels first staged Crime and Punishment as a critically acclaimed Theater Under Ground production at Capitol Hill Arts Center, where it ran for four months in 2007. Original stars Hana Lass (Sonia) and Galen Joseph Osier (Raskolnikov) return for this re-imagined production, which also features Todd Jefferson Moore (Inspector Porfiry) and recorded viola music performed by Melia Watras, a soloist and co-founder of the award-winning Corigliano Quartet. This adaptation was first presented by Writers’ Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois. It was awarded a 2002-2003 Joseph Jefferson Award for Best New Adaptation.
Photo: Todd Jefferson Moore as Inspector
Porfiry and Galen Joseph Osier as Raskolnikov
Photo: Chris Bennion
Tickets: www.intiman.org
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