Crime story Gamm’s successful take on Dostoyevsky BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

The task of whittling down a complex story tends to be doomed to failure — what abridged book-on-tape has ever left in enough? So the stage adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (through October 9), by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus, is an unlikely success — one doubled by a propulsive rendering by the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre.

All good thrillers are psychological thrillers, even if they bill themselves as the action-adventure sort. Witness the differences between the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon originals and their lame franchise sequels — explosions and shoot-’em-ups without the tension of honest inner turmoil is just so much noise. Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel is the template for countless in-the-mind-of-the-killer thrillers. The story tells of Raskolnikov, an impoverished student who kills an old pawnbroker lady with an axe to steal her money.

If a novel of nearly 600 pages can be boiled down and end up concentrated rather than trivialized, this is the one. After all, there is one single point that we — and Dostoyevsky — are interested in: how can someone start out as a human being with normal fellow-feeling and end up a monster? How do the best and the brightest talk themselves into rationalizing evil?

Having a three-person cast focuses the effect further, narrowing the points of view through which we vicariously participate. In addition to Raskolnikov (Anthony Estrella), there is police investigator Porfiry (Richard Donelly) and streetwalker Sonia (Casey Seymour Kim), with the latter two actors playing multiple roles.

Under the attentive and imaginative direction of Peter Sampieri, the story is framed by brief scenes of Raskolnikov manacled and coughing on a prison cell floor. It is 18 months after the crime, in an intro that is not in the original 2003 production. This clarifies the intervening scenes as helter-skelter recollections, fevered thoughts that collide and merge into one another while the actors’ chameleon transformations remind us of Raskolnikov’s conscience-ridden, shifting self-image.

Former law student Raskolnikov wrote an article on the psychology of criminals before and after they commit a crime, which investigator Porfiry read. What fascinated Porfiry was the piece’s conclusion, the Nietzchean Ÿbermensch notion that for some "extraordinary" people the law needn’t apply, that they have a right to transgress the rules of ordinary mortals in order "to move the world forward." (As the program notes, Nietzche credited Dostoyevsky as "the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.")

Although Estrella has strong support, he is the whirling dynamo powering this production. He doesn’t give Raskolnikov a heartbeat-worth of inner rest, even when the student is calm on the outside. With nary an unmotivated twitch, before Estrella is near the end of these 90 intermissionless minutes, Raskolnikov’s filthy strands of hair are flinging beads of sweat like a guilt-ridden priest dispensing holy water. A riveting, guileless performance.

Sonia is a prostitute driven to that life in order to keep her family from starvation. Kim gives her a believable softness, contrasting her portrayal of the stone-cold pawnbroker. Raskolnikov has rescued Sonia’s dying alcoholic father from a tormenting crowd and handed over his last kopeck for the man’s funeral, reprising a scene when he was powerless as a boy watching a crowd encouraging a man who was beating his horse to death. (As Raskolnikov’s father explained, they were drunk and they were people.) Donelly as the alcoholic father is without nuance, but he cleverly sets up the amiable police investigator for a culminating payoff: revealing with a final reaction whether he has been honestly sympathetic to the clever student or just reeling him in.

As for the technical support, the lighting and set design by Dan Bilodeau is quite effective. His set solves both the problem of not turning this into a horror movie when the ax murder happens and Kim needing to play two victims in that scene: action can take place behind a backdrop scrim, which snaps to black. Costume design by Marilyn Salvatore maintains the mood, and sound design by Katherine Buechner effectively uses mournful Russian songs at crucial, quiet moments.

Crime and Punishment is not so much about a murder, or even about a murderer, as about redemption. Raskolnikov clings to Christianity — especially to the resurrection of Lazarus, for metaphorical reasons — like a drowning man clutches whatever debris offers itself. In turn, this tightly written adaptation aims down that through-line as though the devil himself were in the crosshairs. For those of us not Christian, the concluding words of this play, uttered by a hallucination, aim at redeeming our faith in humanity. Nothing else matters, Sonia implies, if a hardened heart can crack and let the world pour in.

With this production, Gamm once again scores a hit. As the newest Actors’ Equity theater company around, it’s made us expect no less.