BWW Reviews: Satire Lives On in DYING FOR IT

It's by tragic coincidence that the Atlantic Theater Company's newest production opens at a time when the permanent silencing of satirists is so fresh in the minds of its audience members.

Twenty-eight-year-old Nikolai Erdman was a promising playwright in Soviet Russia when his sophomore effort, The Suicide, had trouble getting past government censors, despite a letter of recommendation from Konstantin Stanislavsky to Joseph Stalin. Its premiere production was shut down on what would have been the day of its 1928 opening and the play was never produced in his lifetime.

Five years later, Erdman's satirical wit earned him passage to Siberia and he was condemned to a career of only being permitted to write plays and screenplays for children; itself a premise ripe for satire.

The Suicide did hit Broadway briefly in 1980, by way of London, and playwright Moira Buffini's streamlined adaptation, titled Dying For It, comes to New York via the same route. As is often the case with "dangerous art" from a past era, the proceedings may seem a bit tame when not considered in their original context. But if director Neil Pepe's spirited production contains more fluffy fun than satirical bite, the contemporary eye can also see how daring it must have been for its time.

Designer Walt Spangler's impressively realistic depiction of a dreary and dilapidated tenement house plays straight for the zanier antics of the piece, like the energetic tunes played by Andrew Mayer and Nathan Dame on violin and accordion, that seem desperate to prove that merriment abounds.

Dour-faced Joey Slotnick makes for a terrifically drab post-revolution everyman, Semyon Semyonovich Podeskalnikov. Unable to find a job, miserable in his marriage to his overworked wife (Jeanine Serralles) and sharing a home with his overbearing mom (Mary Beth Peil), Semyon's temporary disappearance one night leads his family to believe that he intends to commit suicide. Once word gets out, in a twist that suggests today's overload of corporate sponsorship, vultures start appearing to try and convince the poor sap that if he's going to end it all he should write a suicide note endorsing their cause.

The rascally priest (Peter Maloney), the pompous writer (Patch Darragh) and the perceptive prostitute (Mia Barron) are among the familiar types goading him to do it for the church, for the arts and for the sexual liberation of women.

There's more comic brio to be found in the performances of Robert Stanton as a spokesman for the political intelligentsia, Ben Beckley as a loyal Soviet postman who takes inflated pride in his minor achievements and Clea Lewis, once again using her unique combination of droll and ditzy, as a desperate romantic. The evening's impressive anchor is C.J. Wilson as Semyon's tough, but sympathetic housemate.

Of course, once Semyon starts enjoying his new-found popularity as a martyr-for-hire, the time comes for him to earn it.

If jabs like the one about not caring for Karl Marx's writing aren't exactly the sharpest of satirical darts, the more subversive humor comes out of the general tone of the piece indicating that the relatively new worker's paradise isn't exactly getting off to a rousing start.

As one exchange puts it, "You can't sentence a man to live."

"Why not? He deserves it."

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