Dying For It Review

The playbill for British playwright Moira Buffini’s Dying For It—now playing at the Atlantic Theater Company in NYC—indicates that this is a ‘free adaptation’ of Soviet playwright Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide. That fact is plainly evident once you start to hear the occasional F-bombs fly, and for a while, Buffini’s take on the colorful denizens of a ramshackle boarding house—who rally around suicidal, unemployed, headed-for-martyrdom figurehead Semyon Semyonovich (Joey Slotnick)—is filled with the promise of making the political quite personal, and how the societally disenfranchised simply wish to stand up and be counted. (Reportedly, Stalin was not a fan of Erdman’s original.)