Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky wrote many of his works quickly, hoping to make the money to pay off his debts. As Vladimir Nabokov notes in his Lectures on Russian Literature, Dostoyevsky seldom reread what he’d written or reshaped the beginning of a novel to accommodate later changes. Indeed, the complexity of Dostoyevsky’s characters may well have had something to do with his hectic writing schedule. If a character contradicts himself, very well: he contains multitudes. Even the relatively simple arc of the story in Crime and Punishment–Raskolnikov feels guilty about the murders and confesses under the combined influence of a sympathetic female friend and a prying police detective–might also be an artifact of Dostoyevsky’s haste. A no-frills story helps ensure that a novel won’t go off track.
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Neither the novel nor the adaptation is Christian propaganda, but much of the production’s power comes from the way it embraces Dostoyevsky’s central question: whether Raskolnikov does–or should–believe in God, redemption, and resurrection. Halberstam never skirts these spiritual issues, nor does he trivialize them. In fact every element of his production reinforces these themes. The spare, dark set (by Heather Graff and Richard Peterson) mirrors the anguish Raskolnikov feels. Joel Moritz’s lighting design is so filled with shadows it might be better described as a darkness design, each spotlit performance emphasizing that we’re mere sparks in an endless void.
