By the summer of 1865, Fyodor Dostoyevsky had lost all his money at the casinos. He couldn't afford to pay his debts and couldn't afford to eat, living off tea for days at a time.
He needed to sell a story, and he imagined his next novel as a study of chronic Russian drunkenness: His father was an alcoholic surgeon who was murdered, it is said, by his own exasperated serfs. They poured vodka down his throat until he drowned.
The first drafts of Crime and Punishment followed the Marmeladov family, whose patriarch is a howling, pathetic drunk, and whose daughter is driven to prostitution by her wicked stepmother. But another character, the destitute and self-loathing neighbor named Raskolnikov, kept growing until he took over the novel. It's not hard to understand why: Raskolnikov is a car wreck of a man, and his wretchedness demands rubbernecking. His misplaced desire to be an intellectual superman, to show off to himself, leads him to murder two old women with an ax ("I needed to know that I was something more than an insect in the web of life") and launch himself into a hot hell of bad conscience.
"God grants peace to the dead, doesn't he?" he keeps asking everyone in this stage adaptation: his neighbor Sonia, the police inspector, the audience. Actor Galen Joseph Osier, as Raskolnikov, asks in a desperate, plaintive tone, not so much trying to absolve himself of his crime as hoping that better things await him.
The stripped-down script for three actors, by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus, is all about Raskolnikov: the natural extension of the impulse that drove Dostoyevsky to abandon—and, he told some friends, to burn—the first versions of Crime and Punishment. Campbell and Columbus trap us in the supremely uncomfortable prison of Raskolnikov's skull. (And trap Osier onstage: He leaves only once, for a few seconds, to take a gulp of water.)
The stage is steeply raked with three chairs and three doors that the other characters charge through, intruding on Raskolnikov's miserable, but fiercely defended, solitude. Osier is pale and greasy haired, dressed in a billowing shirt covered in "yellow, human stains," lurching from sullen silences to nervous, feverish monologues. Watching Osier, we can see Raskolnikov's soul squirm.
Director Sheila Daniels mounted the same script in the summer of 2007 in a tiny, sweltering basement theater—the late Capitol Hill Arts Center—with two of the same three actors. A thin scrim separated the stage from the seats, forcing the audience to lean forward and eavesdrop, as if through a crummy Russian tenement wall. It was 90 minutes of tight, searing realism.
Transferring that production to the much-larger stage at Intiman (where Daniels was hired as associate artistic director in the fall of 2007) required reimagining. This production feels more expressionistic, a memory play with lighting cues (turning the gray walls a luminous gold) and sound effects (a viola score, pen scratching on paper) to remind us we're in a man's head. The other actors—Hana Lass and Todd Jefferson Moore—play multiple roles: Sonia, her drunken father, a bitchy pawnbroker, Inspector Porfiry, etc. In the 2007 version, this compound casting seemed like a fringe-theater necessity. At Intiman, it feels more like a choice: Raskolnikov's ingrown mind sees others dimly.
Lass, as the meek prostitute Sonia, plays counterpoint to Osier's fretting, fevered Raskolnikov. She occasionally slips into a distractingly performative mode—at one point she reads Raskolnikov the story of Lazarus, sounding more like an actor enjoying a recitation than a timid young lady commanded to read aloud. Her performance as the nasty pawnbroker, however, is barking and excellent.
The addition of Moore, who replaces Mark Fullerton from the original production, is an improvement. Such heavy, dark drama needs leavening, and every time Moore walks onstage feels like a reprieve. Moore, who has a long list of clowns on his résumé, from the Lion in The Wizard of Oz to Jacques in As You Like It, deploys tiny pauses to turn lines into punch lines. He's a cheerful manipulator, charming Raskolnikov into confessing: "This is a whole new kind of crime," he says. "A modern murder! A murder with a psychological explanation." Raskolnikov wants nothing more than to be psychologically interesting.
The same day that Crime and Punishment opened at Intiman, three high-school students pleaded guilty to the fatal, random beating of Edward Mc-Michael (also known as "the Tuba Man") just three blocks from Intiman's doors. King County prosecuting attorney Dan Satterberg suggested that one of the murderers, who was 15, just "thought he ought to do something to show off." 
