Crime and Punishment

Constance Garnett was a fine lady with a tin ear who translated the great 19th century Russian writers into a Victorian taffeta Modern Library prose. We owe her much thanks for her hardihood, but it is refreshing to find out every so often that Dostoevsky really didn't write that funny way. The Loeb Repertory Company has staged a collection of scenes from Crime and Punishment that pierces through the Garnettian fog to something close to the original electricity of Dostoevsky's art.

But the Loeb's Crime and Punishment is a collection of scenes and not a play. Director Joseph Everingham has worked with Marcel Dubois' adaptation of Dostoevsyk's novel (a fact which the Loeb program is peculiarly reticent to acknowledge. One hopes they've paid some royalties). Scenes and characters are plucked out of the novel, told somewhat arbitrarily to line up acts, and sent out to do their paces.

Their paces are admirable. The production is remarkably finished for a repertory company opening night. Every element works toward lucid characterizations. Everingham stands the characters in close confrontation: Raskolnikov (Paul Glaser) who murders to test a philosophy, stands in a limp full shirt and baggy trousers next to John Lithgow's ramrod prissy Luzhin, the rich, hollow financee of Raskolnikov's sister. The lines of character like the lines of John Braden's sets are balanced, clear and instantly defined. Bea Paipert creates two brief roles, the hunched, old pawnbroker Raskolnikov kills and a crazy madam at a police station, in maybe three minutes of stage time. Tom Jones plays a marvelously affected Police Lieutenant who obviously should have been a general.

In larger roles, Kathryn Walker plays the prostitute Sonya, who will redeem Raskolnikov, with a willowy tenderness and strength. Joel M. Kramer portrays a Ustinovian police magistrate with an ominous keen-mindedness.

The trouble is that one sees little but characterizations, and cameo characterizations at that. The production is a series of marvelous still photographs freezing colorful characters in revealing attitudes. There can be some movement within scenes: a first-act police station swarms with people, voices and crimes in a little masterpiece of Everingham's physical and vocal choreography. Glaser and Kramer, and Glaser and Miss Walker can move toward climax and depth in the confines of a single scene. But little holds the scenes together, and when in the third act the play enters its third hour at the same time as the pace of the scenes goes a little too slow, a new fog of fatigue creeps over Dostoevsky.

It's an almost insurmountable problem to condense and excerpt a tightly structured novel down to a play. The philosophic discussions and illuminating encounters of Crime and Punishment must play out against a double suspense: the detective Porfiry closing in on Raskolnikov, and Raskolnikov's mind closing in on itself. At the Loeb there is no strength to either line of tension. The scenes are excerpted with little attempt to crowd in exposition, which makes them good theater, but it also destroys the time sense of the play. You just can't be sure when things are happening, hours or days apart. The pulse of external suspense isn't regular.

The internal suspense is fitfully hinted at by an occasional scream in Raskolnikov's mind, a staged hallucination or a spiderweb backdrop. But these are only in use sporadically and with a touch of embarrassment. They neither interfere nor work. Glaser is a skilled actor with a tormented voice and a hauntng face, but he doesn't have the time or the lines to hone the play into form with the tension of mind.

The last scene of the play, Raskolnikov's confusion is strikingly staged and acted. It is gripping from beginning to end. The beginning and end of that one scene. The entire cast enters from darkened wings to hear the cry of guilt. But there should have been no need for their physical presence. The suspense of event and mind should have brought their presence into every scene. As it was they were felt only when seen. The limitations of stage adaptation provided an intriguing, enjoyable production that blocked the overtones of Dostoevsky's greatness.