THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

If your professors instilled in you an abiding fear of Russian literature, it helps to view Marilyn Campbell and Curt Columbus' 100-minute adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel as an episode of Columbo ( the TV series, for you youngsters ): At the outset, we learn that an ax-murderer has killed two people. The unemployed tutor who applies to the police for the return of property from the deceased's estate reveals his culpability—to us—but will the investigating officer find the evidence to convict him, or will he confess to his crime?

Inspector Porfiry's job is no everyday third-degree interrogation, since Rodyon Raskolnikov must first be persuaded that he has, in fact, committed a crime. His plan, see, was to rob the neighborhood loan shark and use the stolen money to help a young prostitute whose earnings support her mother and sisters following the death of their dissolute father. Spurred by a fantasy of himself as a liberator like Napoleon, in the sweltering heat of a St. Petersburg summer, Raskolnikov's inexperience at felonious assault causes him to bungle his mission, slaying not only his chosen target, but an innocent bystander unfortunate enough to interrupt him in mid-deed, after which he flees with only a small sum to show for his efforts.

What inspired Dostoyevsky to write his 1865 novel was the concept—coming at the end of the Romantic movement, but decades before Nietzsche coined "Ubermensch" as the definitive term for its persona—of the "superior" man that Raskolnikov fancies himself to be, an extraordinary individual whose altruistic motives transcend the rules that govern society's less gifted citizens. "What if the two kinds [get mixed up]?" asks Porfiry, and with that question, our perpetrator's resolve begins to crumble.

So do the ends justify the means—even when the ends go no further than intentions? Ed Porter makes a suitably squirrely Raskolnikov, while Jack McCabe and Maureen Yasko together exhibit protean virtuosity playing the eight auxiliary characters needed for the flashbacks engineering our existential hero's downfall, even as they point him the way to redemption for his vanity. Playgoers still chafing under recollections of scholarly labors devoted to this cumbersome classic will welcome Mary-Arrchie Theatre's articulate condensation, under the expert direction of Richard Cotovsky, of its source material into a suspense-filled procedural of duration no lengthier than that of your average seminar.