VLADIMIR And The Fight For Truth — Review

Vladimir Putin does not appear in Vladimir, Erika Sheffer’s stirring if undercooked new play opening tonight at New York City Center. Sheffer’s world premiere political drama, presented by Manhattan Theatre Club through November 10, is concerned with more sweeping questions than the whims of a single brutish autocrat. She is not interested in Putin. She is interested in what the Putins of the world do to all of us.

“I bet his dick is so small,” is the judgment of our protagonist Raya (Francesca Faridany) on ol’ Vlad. A Russian independent journalist, Raya has just returned from reporting on human rights violations in Chechnya amidst Russia’s forceful retaking of the territory. Recovering from burns, Raya arrives home to Moscow in time for Putin’s 2004 re-election.

Raya is eager to return to Chechnya immediately. Raya’s daughter, Galina (Olivia Deren Nikkanen) begs her mother to stay long enough to attend her wedding; while her editor Kostya (Norbert Leo Butz) warns of the growing danger to journalists across Russia. Unflagging, Raya pushes forward with a story on tax fraud at the highest levels of Putin’s government, pulling low-ranking civil servant Yevgeny (David Rosenberg) into her investigation. 

Given both the play’s setting and Donald Trump’s continued threats against independent journalism, one could be forgiven for walking into Vladimir fearing an overwrought, Resistance-pilled US allegory. Certainly that warning lives naturally, or inevitably, in Sheffer’s text. But her greater interest lies in how we all, Russians or otherwise, experience far-off violence and repression through media-shaped narratives—and how we respond when those abstract terrors arrive on our own shores. 

“We don’t matter to anyone,” says Chovka (Erin Darke), a young Chechen rebel who intermittently haunts Raya in flashback. “If I was on your television, would you really care about a war in a place you’ve never been to?” 

“If I saw a real person, who told me a real story,” insists Raya. “A person who made it so I couldn’t look away.” 

Too much of Sheffer’s dialogue is awkward theme-stating in this manner. Her journalists tend to speak in stilted explanations, elucidating points that no reporter would need clarified. Faridany and Butz are fine performers incapable of giving a bad performance—both find what texture they can in characters written more as embodiments of contrasting ideas than as actual human beings. 

And yet, those ideas do hold power—particularly once Yevgeny comes into play. A modest if impulsive man, decent to his core, Yevgeny is affectingly portrayed by a very restrained Rosenberg. The corruption he unearths is, like him, mundane—just a tax fraud scheme, not a spree of killings. And while Kostya retreats to a state-run outlet and Raya questions the value of risking her life for her work, Yevgeny soldiers on. He is not naive, but merely constant. The truth must be known, regardless of the risk.

An unsettling picture comes into focus: Yevgeny is the hero of a story where there are no heroes. His bravery will ultimately do little to stem the rising tide of autocracy. Mark Wendland’s blank, generic TV studio set, aggressively ugly though it may be, begins to make sense. This story could be taking place anywhere. Chovka could be any doomed resistance fighter, and Yevgeny any whistleblower. The specifics scarcely matter—that’s precisely what is so frightening.

It is frightening for Raya, who grows doubtful that her work of telling these doomed stories holds any meaning. All her subjects, she fears, just become characters, abstract concepts of heroism. But as they bow to that reality and prioritize her own lives, can Raya or Kostya ever live with themselves? Sheffer’s characters start to feel like desperate, caged animals, trapped in a maze of impossible choices. (Literally so when Kostya tackles a producer who shuts down a tough, honest segment—the two men roll around like two children mad at the world, with no-one to punch but each other.) 

For all the play’s dramatic flaws, Sheffer’s questions around how we absorb or deflect these daily horrors ultimately proves potent. Just two days after I saw Vladimir, an Israeli airstrike on a hospital compound in Gaza set a refugee camp ablaze, killing five people and injuring dozens. My social media feed quickly filled with unimaginable images, all of them filtered through first-person accounts. I thought of those real people on the ground, and the fast-spreading posts quickly turning them into characters within our larger narrative. How fast will they fade? Perhaps as soon as I choose to look away.

Vladimir is now in performance through November 10, 2024. For tickets and more information, visit here.