Overview
In this phantasmagoric surreal carnival of a play the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, an impossible person and a compulsive gambler, has signed away the rights to his work to an unscrupulous publisher unless he can finish a novel in less than a month. He has hired Anna, a young girl, to be his secretary, so he can work faster. But he is plagued by terrible nightmares and epileptic seizures, haunted by his near-execution for treason and his years of hard labor in Siberia, his deeply dysfunctional love life with his unfaithful but compelling first wife, his tortured relations with the alluring but exasperating Polina, his violent quarrels with Turgenev and Tolstoy, and the ghost of his murdered father, who is convinced that somebody is trying to steal his soup spoons. Dostoyevsky is both arrogant and servile, compassionate and ruthless, foul tempered and funny, and his life is a terrible train wreck, complete with an appearance by Anna Karenina, as well as the dead Pushkin and Gogol, and a mysterious Double who wears a potato sack on his head. Anna is convinced she is trapped in a room with a lunatic. But gradually she begins to piece together the complex and tragic puzzle that is his life, and to feel, against her own will, fatally drawn to him. Fast moving and packed to the brim with dark humor and earthy Russian strangeness, this play takes us on an epic journey through the house of mirrors/funhouse mind of a troubled genius. Part of Nigro's long cycle of Russian plays that includes Pushkin, Gogol, An Angler In The Lake Of Darkness, A Russian Play, Emotion Memory, Rasputin, Nights at the Stray Dog Café, Marina, Mandelstam, and others.