The Modern Murderer

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.”