THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV Lookingglass Theatre Company
Starkly poetic, mordantly funny, occasionally overblown but often beguiling, the Lookingglass Theatre staging of The Brothers Karamazov balances 19th-century sentimentality with Russian nihilism, hitting the highlights of the book (as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) without attempting to cram in too much detail. Some significant characters have been excised, but those who haven’t read the original—or haven’t read it in years, like me—probably won’t miss them. (The Inquisitor shows up, of course, and the devil makes a cameo appearance, just as in the book.) Adapter-director Heidi Stillman and her top-notch ensemble flesh out the folks who are left with simple grace and intelligence, keeping us mostly absorbed in the brothers’ intersecting stories through three hours and two intermissions.
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Stillman has a real gift for making the overcooked earnestness of 19th-century prose come urgently to life—a gift I admired greatly in her 2001 production of Dickens’s Hard Times. Though the show has its unwieldy sections—a trial scene, in particular, comes off as potboiling melodrama—they’re outweighed by small, telling moments that linger in the mind: Lawrence Grimm’s emotionally stunted Smerdyakov singing a plaintive song in a Tiny Tim timbre, Lamson’s Katerina swishing nervously about in a constricting taffeta skirt (Mara Blumenfeld’s costumes slyly capture the essence of each character), Smith’s hand trembling as his Ivan handles a crucial bundle of rubles that could save Dmitri’s life.
