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Truth, Meet Power: Erika Sheffer’s Vladimir
On 20 years of Putinism.
It’s not a coup de théâtre: Its closest cousins are cinematic — movies like Spotlight and All the President’s Men — and even Mark Wendland’s set is engineered to evoke TV: road cases and lighting fixtures on booms, cameras and background screens, everything shiny and black, as if Catwoman’s suit has been stretched across the MSNBC soundstage. The Chechen woman delivers a menacing speech about how a crow ate her heart — so that she might “cure [herself] of hope … the most valuable thing a person can own” — and from then onward, Sullivan and the sound and projection designers (Dan Moses Schreier and Lucy Mackinnon, respectively) signal particularly ominous moments with fluttering shadows and the rustle of flapping wings. There are also echoes between the accountant Yevgeny (a moving David Rosenberg), Raya’s source and eventual brave collaborator in the fraud investigation, and the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who worked for an American investment banker in Moscow, and who was tortured and killed in jail after helping to reveal a $230 million tax swindle attempted by Putin’s government on their firm.
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