The first thing you’ll notice when watching the Renaissance Theaterworks production of Erika Sheffer’s “Russian Transport” – which opened Saturday night under Laura Gordon’s direction – is the family pictures, filling the modest Brooklyn home of the Russian-Jewish immigrants who live there (set and lighting design by Jason Fassl).
Related: Human trafficking plays a dramatic role in 'Russian Transport'
Preceding and framing the nonstop fighting and the accompanying heartbreak as well as the pity and the sorrow, they’re a constant reminder that family matters to Diana (Elizabeth Ledo) and Misha (Reese Madigan), trying in their own bent way to do right by their children: 18-year-old Alex (Max Pink) and 14-year-old Mira (April Paul).
The parents fight because money is tight – and because each of them has failed in their jobs and their lives to fulfill their expectations, of themselves and each other. The siblings fight because they’re teenagers – even though it’s clear, in a play where the most important things don’t get said, that Mira admires her brother and that he’s got her back.
And, finally, they fight because they’re not sure what to do upon the arrival of the wolf at the door: 33-year-old Boris (Mark Puchinsky). Diana’s tall and handsome younger brother, Boris is newly arrived in America. But he’s no rube, and he’s less charming than one might imagine from a smile that never reaches his cold eyes.
Boris makes his living in sex trafficking involving Russian girls roughly Mira’s age –underscored here because an achingly vulnerable Paul also plays three of them. After Boris ropes Alex in with the promise of some cash on the side, we see him drive each of these girls from the airport toward their doom.
Alex had thought he was transporting mules delivering drugs; Pink is devastating in absorbing the truth of how he’s actually serving the uncle he vaguely resembles and could become, on a road to hell paved by those nightmarish trips from JFK to Jersey.
Misha and Diana know their world is crumbling around them.
But Madigan’s Misha – gruff because he’s shambling and broken, in a family he can’t feed – is powerless. Most scarred by years of Soviet privation, Ledo’s darkly humorous mother from hell has long embraced the creed that one does whatever one must to survive – even if that means destroying one’s offspring to save them.
Boris ruthlessly exploits these fault lines; the longer this slow burn of a play goes on, the more terrifying the physically imposing Puchinsky becomes.
The young pay the heaviest price; they almost always do. In a uniformly excellent cast, it’s Paul and Pink I’ll most remember, trying and failing to protect each other in a world where they feel ever smaller and more alone – much like those forlorn Russian girls, each one a prisoner of the American dream.
“Russian Transport” continues through Feb. 11 at the Broadway Studio Theatre, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets, visit www.r-t-w.com. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.
PROGRAM NOTES
“A View from the Bridge”: In her program note, Gordon suggests Miller’s great play as a precursor for “Russian Transport,” noting that both plays expose “the underbelly of a family and how they must come to deal with the moral and ethical dilemmas that stand in the way of achieving that better life.” Spot on. Both plays are set among immigrants in Brooklyn. Both address the tension between the law and one’s commitment to an older, darker and unspoken code suggesting omertà and sanctioning murder. Both open with a young and naïve immigrant daughter, enraptured by the American dream. Both involve ultimately powerless adults, unable to square their disappointed expectations with all they’d hoped for. Both are trapped between past and future – represented here by those family photos of an older world I mentioned above and Mira’s photos of exotic destinations and a glamorous life she’ll likely never have.
Related: A man under pressure erupts in 'A View From the Bridge'
Speaking in Russian: Not only do the three adults in this play speak with heavy Russian accents. Sheffer also bakes a healthy amount of Russian into a play where the only character who doesn’t speak Russian is Mira. These aren’t just grace notes designed to create cultural specificity. More important, all that talk in a language one doesn’t know places most of the audience in the same position as Mira – or as the young Russian girls, trying to understand Alex when he’s speaking English. We get the gist but miss the nuance; it makes us feel a bit disoriented. It helps us understand what it must be like, to be young and alone in a country not one’s own, with the same vague but undefined sense we have from the start that something here just doesn’t add up.
Boris and Alex: Boris tells Mira at one point that when he was young, he loved to read; his charm and occasional hints of something wistful are vestiges of that younger and better self. Teenaged Alex – the same age as Boris was when big sister Diana left for America – is in this sense a younger version of Boris himself. Indeed, Diana expressly draws the comparison: “Is like I’m back twenty years and looking at you,” she says to Boris of what it’s like to look at her 18-year-old son.
If Alex gives us a sense of who Boris once was, Boris suggests who Alex could become. The precocious Pink, who first caught my attention years ago at First Stage, does a first-rate job of precisely calibrating the opening steps in such a devolution: with each of the three girls he transports, he’s lost something more of his decency and innocence (like most teen boys, he’s a lot more innocent than he thinks he is). Pink’s performance also illustrates why Alex made this pact with a devil he initially took for a rube: Much as he tries to hide it, he admires his uncle, as the strong male authority figure his emasculated father has failed to be.
Elizabeth Ledo: While Elizabeth Ledo has appeared in more than 20 Milwaukee Repertory Theater shows, she hasn’t appeared on any Cream City stage in eight years, during which this Chicago-based actor has continued doing outstanding, award-winning work in Chicago (she was back in Wisconsin as a Lunt-Fontanne Fellow in 2016). I’ve seen most of it; watching Ledo on stage is always worth the trip south, especially in productions where directors recognize that she’s so much more than the outrageously funny sprites and servants she often plays. She’s among the many reasons I began subscribing years ago to Chicago’s Court Theatre, where she’s a mainstay (and where she won a Jeff Award as Dorine the housekeeper in “Tartuffe”).
Having acted with and directed Ledo (and as one who has herself made the trek south to watch Ledo work), Gordon is among those directors who understands how much Ledo can bring to the table, and Ledo brings plenty here in her return to Milwaukee. Yes, Ledo’s Diana can be very funny. But a woman who cites Lenin and Trotsky while being compared to Stalin – a woman who, at one point, says that one suffers if one breathes – is also very dark, and Ledo travels to all those places, too. Finally and maybe most important, Ledo channels Mother Courage in suggesting a parent who, in her misguidedly warped and often cruelly controlling way, fiercely loves her children; she’s ferocious with them because life has been tough on her. She knows no other way.
Ledo will make her long-overdue return to the Rep come April, in a much-anticipated and star-studded production of “Our Town” in which Gordon will be the Stage Manager. Here’s hoping we see much, much more of her in Milwaukee in the years to come.
Matryoshka: Mira collects Russian nesting dolls; Boris brings her a set as a welcoming gift. Renaissance has prominently featured a set of nesting dolls in its promotional literature, with Paul popping out of the smallest one. Those dolls aptly embody how this play works, and not just because it peels like an onion, one shattering reveal at a time. Those dolls also embody a cast of characters in which everyone plays large, the better to hide how hollow and small they actually feel, in a world whose hidden secret involves the confused and frightened girls at the core of so many stories involving paradise lost.