Crime and Punishment, abridged at APT

Smart teenagers with Theories of Everything make you wish you could fast forward to their mid-20s, when they’re likely to be more sensible and less tiresome.

Sunday evening at American Players Theatre, I was wishing for a fast-forward button for Raskolnikov about 30 minutes into Crime and Punishment, as abridged and adapted by Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus. At 90 minutes, the play (given in the intimate, indoor Touchstone Theatre) is at once too long and too brief.

In reducing Dostoyevsky’s psychological and existential drama to 90 minutes, the playwrights make the tortured protagonist less interesting. Dostoyevsky puts us inside Raskolnikov’s head, to an extent that his absurd theories to justify a murder almost seem to make some sense; speeded up and externalized, not so much. Likewise, in the novel his long unraveling and final confession take on terrifying suspense and inevitability. On the stage, his endless expounding and repeating of his principles grow tedious.

Campbell and Columbus adapted the piece in 2002, and that surprised me. Their version has a 1950s, Playhouse 90 vibe, with its stark, black-and-white austerity, expressionist gloom and self-conscious avant-gardism. The play flows from scene to scene in cinematic and dreamlike fashion, to follow through on the conceit that we are observing a dream or recollection within Raskolnikov’s fevered brain. Certain phrases recur, in dialog and voice-over, as poetic litanies. At one point, the house lights come abruptly full, and Matt Schwader’s Raskolnikov addresses the audience with a Utilitarian moral question about snuffing out one life to preserve the lives of many. (Raskolnikov soon admits that the question had little to do with his actions. So the whole episode is a bit of a red herring.)

All that being said, this production wields a certain power. Schwader’s relentless intensity as Raskolnikov was arresting to start, wore me out a little in the middle, but won me back for the powerful confession scene. Colleen Madden played both of Raskolnikov’s victims — the mean pawnbroker and her innocent sister — and Sonia, the gold-hearted prostitute who sees goodness in Raskolnikov despite his crimes. She’s a marvel as old crone, simple sister and desperate, ardent moon circling the disintegrating anti-hero. James Ridge played Sonia’s drunk of a father with a reckless, bitter cheer that was the most horrifying element of the show. Ridge spent more time as Porfiry, the eccentric and oddly friendly detective who finally brings Raskolnikov to free his impulse to confess. As Ridge plays him, Porfiry is an early prototype of Columbo, complete with patient pauses that his suspect can’t help but fill with self-damning words. Nice.

Kenneth Albers directed with a skilled hand. Surely he had much to do with the clear delineation of the multiple roles and with the clarity of locales drawn from the thin air of Nathan Stuber’s spare, open set.

Crime and Punishment is one of several plays running at American Players Theatre, in Spring Green, Wis. Visit the APT website for a full schedule. Clink on the links for reviews of The Taming of the Shrew, The Critic and The Glass Menagerie.