Indiana Repertory Theatre - The Microwave Dostoevsky

The Microwave Dostoevsky:
Crime and Punishment in 90, short minutes

by Dan Kraner

Understanding a bit about novelist, essayist and philosopher Fyodor Dostoevsky before you see Crime and Punishment will deepen your understanding of the play. Even today Dostoevsky, along with Tolstoy are considered Russia’s two greatest novelists.

Dostoevsky was born in the Malinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow in 1821 where his father was a physician. Growing up surrounded by an orphanage, a lunatic asylum and a cemetery for criminals would profoundly affect — as you can imagine it would — his outlook on life, and Dostoevsky developed a compassion for the downtrodden at a young age. When Dostoevsky was 28 years old he was arrested and exiled to Siberia for nine years for opposing the Tsar of Russia. This experience also profoundly changed the playwright.

Dostoevsky returned to Saint Petersburg in 1859 and there wrote many more literary journals and novels, including Crime and Punishment.

Adapted by playwrights Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus, Indiana Reprtory Theatre’s three-actor adaptation compresses this staggering novel into a 90-minute rush of tension between a young student and a police inspector. Raskolnikov, the student played by Butler graduate Andrew Ahrens, and police inspector Porfiry, played by Chicagoan Peter DeFaria, debate criminal intentions in a world gone mad with lawlessness and self-interest. Jenny McKnight masterfully plays the part of Sonia and rounds out the trio.

The key question of the story is Raskolnickov believes he somehow is exempt from moral condemnation — that his intelligence and drive place him above the law.
Is killing one person moral justification for saving hundreds? It’s a premise that fires the imagination and sends people out of the theater provoked in debate-filled conversation.

Crime and Punishment continues through March 8 on the Upperstage at Indiana Repertory Theatre. Show times vary. Tickets are $34-$49. Call (317) 635-5252 or log on www.irtlive.com.