nah pop, no style

Plenty has happened in the past two weeks that was worth blogging on; I was however, too scatterbrained to actually blog on it. So now I start a series of posts about the past. We’ll begin with the events of Friday, Oct. 2: Crime & Punishment, presented by Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre.

Regular readers may recall that I’m a longtime supporter and minor league subscriber to PICT; they regularly do some of the best work in Pittsburgh, theatre-wise, I think. This year, I meant to catch Rock ‘n Roll at the beginning of the season but failed, and instead saw Doubt a few months back, and Crime & Punishment last week. Of course, because I’m a slacker, I saw it on its final weekend, so my review is of little tangible use to you. But I wrote it anyway. Suck it up.

C&P is known best to me as the thick-ass Russian novel that my senior year AP English teacher managed to give us two pop quizzes on, two days in a row, both of which the entire class failed because we couldn’t keep up with the reading. I remembered liking it pretty good, until that point where I couldn’t persevere through the assignments, then began associating the book with F’s.

PICT’s production was ambitious in its sparsity: three actors playing a good half-dozen or more characters. A stage with just a door, a desk, some hay, and some big plastic sheets across the back. The challenge was, of course, to connote the different settings in which the scenes took place — but at the same time, it was to not denote them. Crime and Punishment, if you haven’t read it, is deeply psychological, and takes place largely in the mind of the feverishly remorseful Raskolnikov. In PICT’s production, the confusion brought on by the undefined scene changes and settings is in fact the confusion of Raskolnikov.

The acting was decent; Joel Ripka’s Raskolnikov was maybe a bit TOO crazy here and there, and Susan Goodwillie, playing so many characters in quick succession, seemed now and then to lose the direction of a particular role. Neither was distractingly off, though, and Larry John Meyers was captivating as the detective Porfiry (and another role or two).

The moments where the dramatic production was most self-conscious (upon stabbing each victim, played by the same woman, Ripka-as-Raskolnikov grabs a plastic sheet from the rafters, rips it down and places it on the floor to signify the body) were in fact some of the best. In not attempting to sexy up a simple production of a complex story, directory Matthew Gray hit the mark.