Two Comic Playwrights Find Dark Humor in Russian Aggression

Theatre has become a slow art. It takes time to write a play, and then additional time to get someone to produce it; no wonder, then, that current events are most likely to show up in cabaret and standup. (Political theatre’s version of super-timeliness tends to be, like, the past five years.) And drama requires a certain slowness from us, too. You can casually wander out of a movie, pause a television show, check social media as you read a book, or—I don’t know—knit. But the scant hundred minutes of Sarah Gancher’s Off Broadway play “Russian Troll Farm,” for instance, have to unfold in the molasses time of unadulterated, undistracted viewing. Luckily, that fight for our scattered attention, and even the topical delay, can become part of the show itself.

Gancher’s “workplace comedy,” now at the Vineyard Theatre, is set during the six-month run-up to the 2016 Presidential election, and dramatizes Russian cyber interference by the Internet Research Agency, in St. Petersburg. For years, the real-life Russian company used bogus social-media accounts to sow fake news and real division, apparently manufacturing millions of tweets’ worth of institutional mistrust and norm-eroding nastiness. (In Gancher’s play, we hear a supervisor exhorting her underlings to normalize the word “pussy” to diminish Americans’ shock at Donald Trump’s hot-mike vulgarities.) Despite the intervening insurrections and invasions, the world of “Russian Troll Farm” doesn’t feel that distant. Perhaps you recognize the still constant drip of conspiracy theories in your own feeds, or maybe you saw this very play, which aired online during the pandemic shutdown, just before the election in 2020.

Gancher is best known as a collaborating playwright on group-written musicals: she shaped both “The Lucky Ones” and “Hundred Days” with the husband-and-wife band the Bengsons; she co-wrote “Mission Drift” with the collective the TEAM. There are no songs in this project, so Gancher provides the orchestrated din of social-media chatter. The earlier production of “Russian Troll Farm”—co-created by TheaterWorks Hartford, the Civilians, and TheatreSquared, a company in Fayetteville, Arkansas—was one of the notable successes of the streaming-theatre era. (It won an Obie.) The characters appeared in familiar Zoom boxes, their faces uncomfortably close; as you looked at your screen, you could see the reflection of your own face, a ghost among machines. The Russian trolls were trying to lead normal lives—fall in love, keep their day jobs—while being sucked into the relentless online maw, but so were we all, and that bad-mirror symmetry was key to the show’s effectiveness. (Its co-directors, Jared Mezzocchi and Elizabeth Williamson, worked on this version as the video and projection designer and the dramaturge, respectively.)

Now that “Farm” has been translated to three dimensions, in a strangely glossy production by the director Darko Tresnjak, it takes a bit more to recognize our reflections onstage. (We can almost see them: Alexander Dodge has designed a set that looks as white and gleaming as an Apple Store.) The Russian trolls are still the same, but with mostly new actors playing them. There’s the story-obsessed screenwriter Nikolai (Hadi Tabbal), the ex-journalist Masha (Renata Friedman), the robotic Egor (Haskell King, the only holdover, and excellent again), the rambunctious sociopath Steve (John Lavelle), and the group’s ice-queen supervisor, Ljuba (Christine Lahti).

As pressure comes down from their higher-ups, the trolls crack neatly along the fissure Gancher has written for each one. Masha falls for Nikolai, who bewitches her with his weird love for their work. “Human beings need stories, they crave them. In terms of mankind’s hierarchy of needs, stories are right between sleep and sex,” Nikolai says, a glint of the zealot in his eyes. Eventually, Steve, drunk on Russophilia and grievance, convinces Egor to sabotage their co-workers out of a need for advancement as well as an aimless hatred for authority, and, perhaps, for women.

But it’s a comedy! The show’s most reliable comic strategy is unleashing Lavelle, who plays Steve as Jack Black in rock-star mode, wielding a power belly and a Brian Blessed beard. It’s fun to see Steve freak out, especially when he can’t get a rise out of Egor, who is seemingly impervious to emotion. “I’m gonna knock you down and curb-stomp your vampire wax face, you fucking bat-faced SHIT! You fucking slovakian fuck! Soulless, emotionless, bloodless, dickless thumb with a face drawn on it!” When the audience laughs at these shrieking Dadaist insults, it’s hard not to feel as though we are being manipulated as easily as some Pepe the Frog galoot on 4chan.

When Steve isn’t shouting Sun Tzu quotations about effective warfare, though, the production clearly feels a need to keep the audience amped. Tresnjak and Gancher rely on clichés I associate with goofball Internet thrillers—the characters say everything they type out loud, and they type very fast. In the end, the show turns to sentiment to keep our hummingbird brains engaged: Ljuba pivots without warning from iron lady to surrogate mother. Lahti, as Ljuba, delivers a long, tear-choked monologue about the social programming, first Soviet, then Russian, that turned her into an informer against women she might have been able to love. Even though her sudden sorrow rings false, the mawkish turn is understandable—it’s a huge temptation to imagine emotional punishments for people who inflict emotional damage for a living. Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher did something similar with “The Social Network,” letting their ersatz Zuckerberg have Zuck’s real career success while giving him an invented private loneliness. Nikolai insists that humans “need stories,” but why do we need the story that bad guys are secretly sad? Fate doesn’t punish people who break society; that task is left to us.

Despite some awkwardness, Tresnjak’s production of “Russian Troll Farm” still does an excellent job of showing us the reality-irreality fault line. At the end of the show, we learn how many of the troll characters’ tweets were real—a surprising number. It’s hardly revelatory that Russian trolls wrote, “Obama called me clinger. Hillary calls me deplorable. Terrorists call me infidel. Trump calls me American.” But no part of our national conversation was uncorrupted: Russian trolls also ran the @Blackantifa social-media account, for example, which posted righteously about police violence. Gancher and Tresnjak use our attention against us here, sending our thoughts scrolling back through the production. In retrospect, the distracting narratives about Masha and Nikolai’s romance and Ljuba’s regret seem to be spoonfuls of sugar that Gancher added to her medicine. Many of us don’t want to remember 2016, or see the way it’s echoed in our current election discourse. But Gancher insists on our deeper reflection, and makes us sit with our memories.

“Russian Troll Farm” reminded me of a wild dreamscape comedy I saw in early February at the Wilma, in Philadelphia: “My Mama and the Full-Scale Invasion,” by Sasha Denisova, translated from the Russian by Misha Kachman. (A filmed version will be available on demand on the theatre’s Web site from February 19th to March 17th.) For most of the rollicking show, directed by Yury Urnov, we watch Denisova (played by Suli Holum) as she funnels her fear for her mother in Kyiv into a series of exaggerated fantasies. Terrified by the idea of her mother enduring Russian bombardment, Denisova instead imagines her tough-as-beets mama, Olga Ivanovna (Holly Twyford), commanding anti-Putin troops from her apartment balcony and tartly telling Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron how to do their jobs. The Russian-malfeasance plot is similar to “Farm” ’s, as is the late-breaking-footnote approach to the truth. Just before the end, a projection shows the recording of a video call. In a shocking, instantly affecting moment, we see Denisova’s actual mother—gray-haired, a bit impatient, in her apartment. In English and Russian, she says, on her daughter’s cue, “Hello, Philadelphia! I am Olga Ivanovna, I live in Kyiv, in Ukraine. Glory to the Armed Forces of Ukraine!” Theatre may be full of slow, deliberate fictions, but it can also make the real explode like a special effect. Olga, certainly, seems tired of blurring the line: “Have I mixed it up again?” ♦