If your theatrical tastes run to cheerful musical revivals providing restorative food and drink at comfortably spaced intermissions, “The Boys” isn’t for you. This imported Ringling International Arts Festival offering runs for two and a half hours without intermission, and furthermore, is performed entirely in Russian.
Nevertheless, if you don’t mind sitting that long and can manage to quick read the translations projected in big white letters on the rough back wall of the almost bare stage of Sarasota’s Cook Theatre, you will find the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts production of incidents from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1880 novel, “The Brothers Karamazov”, engrossing, powerfully acted and thought-provoking.
Considerable credit for this intense drama must be accorded to Sergey Zhenovach, the award-winning Moscow director who managed to adapt nine chapters from the more-than-900-page masterpiece for the stage, first at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts in 2004, and since then, at many international venues. A cursory examination of the book’s well-known English translation by Constance Garnett suggests that many of the speeches are taken, almost word for word, from the original text.
Still, it could not have been easy for Zhenovach to adapt a mere subplot from a complicated psychological novel into a play retaining at least some of Dostoevsky’s complex, self-contradictory characters and challenging spiritual themes. “The Boys” focuses on cruelty and kindness, humiliation and pride, poverty and wealth.
Ilusha Snegiryov, (Sergey Pirnyak) the nine year old child of an impoverished former infantry captain becomes aggressive and wounds a classmate with his little penknife after his father is egregiously insulted by Dimitri, the profligate oldest son of a prominent provincial landowner named Karamazov. Persecuted by his classmates, Ilusha becomes seriously ill.
The Captain (memorably portrayed by Alexey Vertkov) has an insane wife, his little son and three daughters to support and cannot afford to challenge Dimitri to a duel. Incidents of cruelty abound. A dog has been given meat with a pin in it, and a goose’s neck has been deliberately broken.
Christian compassion is extended by Alexey Karamazov (quietly and convincingly played by Alexandr Koruchekov), the landowner’s youngest son, who has previously entered a monastery. It is Alexey who, speaking to the boy’s classmates at Ilyusha’s funeral, admonishes them to be kind above all else.
Any plot summary of this ambitious and absorbing play–or of the novel of which this play is only a fragment–is perforce insufficient. Suffice it to say that all the actors in this drama from the women and the schoolboys and Ilyusha, who seems in the end to be an almost-Christ-like figure, to Perezvon, a large dog engagingly portrayed by Sergey Abroskin, are excellent.
It may well be mere coincidence, but it is interesting to note that not only this Russian play but also Cuban American Nilo Cruz’s “Hurricane” (which was commissioned for the Festival) culminate in the death of a young boy. In each drama, the tragedy seems symbolically sacrificial–a cruel but essential means of resolving conflicts involving self-knowledge and powerful desires.