David Rosenberg and Francesca Faridany Photo by Jeremy Daniel

Sheffer, whose family emigrated from the USSR in the 1970s, has these characters sound very like us, and their concerns are much like ours: supporting the family, holding a job, staying out of trouble. And fighting corruption, which in Putin's Russia is rampant. Raisa, or Raya for short (Francesca Faridany), writes exposés on the assault on Chechnya that constantly land her in hot water. She wants stability for her college-age daughter Galina (Olivia Deren Nikkanen), but she can't resist fighting the good fight. "How can you ignore this brazen bullshit?" she rages to her editor and frenemy Kostya (Norbert Leo Butz), a more pragmatic journalist whose pay is greater and scruples are smaller. Later he'll leave their journal for a state-sanctioned TV job. More money, less risk. Easier.

Raya smells another story, on a small American boutique investment firm in Moscow that received an enormous tax refund; it has to have been engineered by some government higher-up, possibly as high up as Putin, to mete out to shell companies and dip into. Incendiary stuff, and it will lead to a poisoning attempt, prison (though not for Raya), incessant bugging of phones and apartments, all those merry Kremlin hijinks we're so familiar with.

With so much political intrigue, the personal stories get a bit slighted, though there's a marvelous scene between Raya and Galina at the latter's wedding. And there are missteps in the storytelling. Time and place keep shifting, sometimes confusingly, and Raya has imaginary conversations with a crow, to what purpose I don't get at all. Some actors change dialects depending on who they're talking to, to distinguish between conversations among fellow countrymen vs. those experiencing intelligibility issues. It works, but takes some getting used to.

But. The dialogue's often pithy and sarcastic, in relatable ways. Kostya: "Intractability is a terrible quality in a journalist." Raya: "So are alcoholism and syphilis, but you seem to be doing just fine." The intrigue around the tax investigation keeps building, to a predictable but heartbreaking denouement. And the acting! The whole cast, several in multiple roles, is great, I mean, Dan Sullivan directed. But Faridany is superb, catching Raya's integrity, cynicism, restlessness, relentlessness, and keen skill at fact-finding. She's putting herself in constant danger, she knows any scoop she uncovers is likely to be suppressed and/or lead to a brutalizing from the authorities. She just can't help herself.

Mark Wendland's set design is awfully black and not entirely successful at using one space to convey more than one place–Raya's kitchen counter becomes a bar, that sort of thing. Jess Goldstein's costumes, harking back to the early 2000s, mainly remind us why that wasn't anyone's favorite fashion era, and lighting designer Japhy Weideman might have thrown more light on the proceedings. Dan Moses Schreier's capable sound design includes some thumping original Russian music that helps convey the oppressiveness of the surrounding culture.

And that oppressiveness keeps accumulating. Much of the second act deals with a 2004 school shooting, one that resulted in hundreds of deaths–grossly under-reported by the state, and it may have squelched a warning it received about it. It's an outrage, and so is what happens to Yevgeny (an expert David Rosenberg), an employee at that investment firm who paid the price for knowing too much.

We end with Raya in New York, on a book tour, determined to return to her homeland despite the dangers that await her vs. the safety she could enjoy working for somebody else stateside. "It make me so mad," she tells her scant bookstore audience in inexpert English, "that one man should have such power. One. Small. Not great intellectual, not insightful, only talent is finding ugliness and knowing how to use it, and yet this little man take up such space." It's 2005, and she means Putin. But Vladimir, beyond many other excellent qualities, feels distressingly current: In October 2024, does that sound like anybody?