In Mother Russia, the Communist Party Is Definitely Over

“I miss communism!” howls one of the characters in Lauren Yee’s Mother Russia in a moment of crisis. He and his buddy are both in the fetal position, waiting to have their asses handed to them by the thugs who, in these mad days of perestroika, are roaming the streets of St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad, formerly St. Petersburg) at the behest of a proto-oligarch, collecting “protection” from the owners of the small businesses that have sprung up in the wake of Gorbachev’s repeal of the ban on private enterprise. The year is 1992; the place, the freshly former Soviet Union. Russia is the “wild west,” that same character had crowed earlier, when he was the one holding a gun.

The men in Yee’s keen new play—wonderfully heightened in its comedy, with a veiled sad, wise heart—are an unholy mess: either pillaging, dreaming of pillaging, or blubbering as they get pillaged. Their better angels all have broken wings. “I miss it so much,” one of those cowering friends laments to the other. “There were rules and systems. And as long as you did what they told you to do, you could starve, but you couldn’t screw it up.” “Now I don’t know how to buy toothpaste,” the other sobs. “I go to the store. There are so many brands to choose from. My teeth are rotting, and I don’t know what to do about it.” It’s the play’s women—including the great matriarchal genius loci of the title—who can see what’s really happening. Asked if she misses communism, a disillusioned singer named Katya (Rebecca Naomi Jones), once an underground artist who made her name protesting the old regime, sighs grimly. “No,” she says. “I just find no comfort in what’s replaced it.”

The not-really-a-secret of Mother Russia is that it’s actually about capitalism. Or rather, it’s about the moment of collision between world orders — the chaos and carnage that result from people’s attempts to cling to power while rewriting the rules of how they hold it. “I have been let down by so many shitty men,” says Mother Russia herself as the play begins. David Turner is pristine in the part — gracious, knowing, subtly imperious, with a sense of irony older than the Caucasus. In a sleek, puff-shouldered red dress and matching head scarf (the smart costumes are by Sophia Choi), his Mother Russia is a kind of abstracted, high-fashion babushka, a sexy grandma wrapped in the Soviet flag. And she’s tired of waiting in the wings while the Lenins and Stalins and Gorbachevs and Yeltsins take top billing. After all, she tells us, she was a founding company member of the Moscow Art Theatre! She played “all the cherries in the first production of Anton Chekhov’s seminal play What Ever Happened to Our Cherry Orchard, Mom?”

I giggled my way straight through Mother Russia, but that doesn’t mean that Yee has written a happy play. No one is okay here, and when friendship, hope, or romance make an effort to peek out of the debris, like little burrowing creatures who’ve survived a blast, we shouldn’t get our hopes up. After all, the first interaction we see is one man pointing a gun at another, and you know what “Tony,” as Mama R. would call him, had to say about onstage guns.

At that point, the one with the firepower is Dmitri Petrovich (Steven Boyer), and his “meek and obsequious” target is Evgeny Evgenievich (Adam Chanler-Berat). But only for a moment — then Dmitri recognizes him as a childhood friend. Or rather, he recognizes the son of his mother’s old employer. “Seems like just yesterday my mom was scrubbing the horseshit out of the floor of your dad’s government dacha!” says Dmitri, slapping Evgeny on the back without a hint of irony. Evgeny can’t quite match Dmitri’s hail-bro-well-met energy: His visit to his old playmate isn’t pure of heart. After a string of very funny pleasantries (Yee is delightfully shameless about her deployment of exposition — there’s a flavor of Loren Bouchard’s cartoon canon in the guilelessly informative way her characters address each other), Evgeny admits that he’s actually here on behalf of his big scary dad, Evgeny Evgenievich Sr. “He is now a burgeoning capitalist,” explains the son. “He has half a dozen fearsome men in his employ. Torsos like tanks, ankles like Balanchine.” While the weedy, stooped Evgeny Jr. hardly fits that description, he’s still been sent to do a brute’s job: “I actually did come in to… shake you down,” he mumbles to Dmitri.

Poor Dima. Poor Zhenya. Capitalism’s not going to be kind to anyone — neither these bumblers nor the woman whose life they end up surveilling. Dmitri’s humble shop, it turns out, is just a front for a janky spy operation, and Evgeny, on discovering the target (requested by an anonymous “very high level” client), wants in: She is Katya, once known as Katya M., a famous dissident pop artist, these days just a humble schoolteacher. “Her music was so bold and provocative. So dangerous,” sighs Evgeny. “She defected and now she is back,” he adds with a note of incredulity. “Nobody ever comes back. So why has she?”

Yee’s container is gleefully cheeky — in moments, under Teddy Bergman’s zippy direction, almost farcical — but what she’s set up inside it is, in its own light way, an allegory. Katya stands for art and idealism, Evgeny for privilege (his father was “big in the party” but has “pivoted quite well”), and high-spirited, unlucky Dmitri for the People. What he wants is what anybody wants: to make a decent living, maybe get to cash in on some of those sweet government vouchers that are going around, and, mostly, not to be left by his “kind and wonderful girlfriend,” Masha. He has no legacy of power to live up to or to defy, like Evgeny, nor any wistful righteousness to cope with, like Katya. “We used to value ideas, debate,” Katya tells Evgeny when they meet (not coincidentally) on the bus. “And now all we want is stuff.” Dmitri’s not too proud for stuff. A scene in which he and Evgeny rapturously eat a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish together as if it were the spaghetti in Lady and the Tramp is at once hilarious and pointedly grotesque. The fact that Boyer’s irresistibly amped up, tracksuit-wearing Dima persists in pronouncing it, lustfully, as “Fillet Toe Fish” just adds that last little chef’s-kiss zing of absurdity.

Looking back from our dismal vantage point—all oligarchs and assassinations, war crimes and authoritarianism—it’s no spoiler to say that the antics of Mother Russia aren’t headed toward the light. Yee, Bergman, and their actors pirouette (at one point, in a bonkers Swan Lake interlude, quite literally) in and out of the shadows, tinging our laughter with a brand of sorrowful yearning that Chekhov would surely recognize — Chekhov, whose characters cling to the dream of a more enlightened future, a time when violence and suffering will be remembered as the relics of an older, crueler order. “This is the way things used to happen years ago,” says one of his soldiers (in Paul Schmidt’s translation of Three Sisters) as he watches a fire in the streets. “A surprise enemy attack, arson and looting … And yet of course there’s really an enormous difference between then and now, isn’t there? And after a little time goes by, say two or three hundred years, people will look back on our life with horror … And oh, what a life that will be then!”

Mama knows better. “Never have kids,” Yee’s crimson-clad matriarch warns us. “You are only as happy as your unhappiest child, and me? I have so many.” 

Mother Russia is at Signature Theatre through March 15.