A Martyr for the Cause, if Only He Could Pick One

Who can get enough of Soviet-era stage comedies? That’s a joke, of course. Who knew there were any? Those curious to discover what might have tickled the funny bones of folks suffering under Stalinism may want to attend the Atlantic Theater Company’s production of Dying for It, a “free adaptation” by the British writer Moira Buffini of The Suicide, a 1928 play by Nikolai Erdman. “Might have” are operative words here. Although the celebrated directors Vsevolod Meyerhold and Konstantin Stanislavksy both championed the play, plans to stage it were quashed by the authorities. It was not performed in Moscow until 1982, more than a decade after Erdman’s death, so it’s impossible to know how Russian audiences of the late 1920s might have reacted to this mordant satire about a man whose determination to kill himself wins him a host of fawning friends and admirers. Audiences today, unfortunately, are not likely to find the play an unheralded treasure from the vaults. Although Ms. Buffini’s version has been given a handsome staging directed by Neil Pepe, this bleakly comic portrait of desperate lives in Soviet Russia feels wheezy and labored, ultimately about as much fun as a winter holiday in Siberia. (Grim footnote: Mr. Erdman was exiled there after being arrested on political grounds in 1933.)