Red Sunset

By William Tynan

In what he has described as a coda to his seven-hour Pulitzer-prizewinning epic Angels in America, playwright Tony Kushner has written a little one-act vaudeville called Slavs!, fuzzily subtitled Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness. In 80 wordy minutes, Kushner scampers through seven years in the collapse of Russian communism (the second half of Angels, remember, was called Perestroika) and bounces from the Kremlin to a fantastic archive housing the bottled brains of dead party leaders to a Siberia-like heaven. His final line asks, as Lenin did, "What is to be done?" Audiences are more likely to wonder, "What's been going on?"

Currently playing a limited run off-off-Broadway (other productions are slated for Baltimore, Pittsburgh and elsewhere), Slavs! is a series of sketches held together mostly by its cross-pollinating cast of eccentrics. They include the passionate Politburo member identified as the World's Oldest Living Bolshevik (first seen in Angels), the ferociously bored lesbian (Marisa Tomei, in a sly, engaging performance) who guards the aforementioned brains, and an eight-year-old girl whose grandparents were exposed to radiation and passed down to her a genetic flaw that has rendered her mute.

Kushner's baroque dialogue is too often mind boggling rather than thought provoking. It doesn't help that he has his characters talk with distracting Slavic accents -- illogical in any case, since they are all speaking their native tongue. Slavs! is not without wit, and it is only a one-acter, but as Kushner's first play since Angels, it is one act's worth of disappointment.