Mother Russia ★★★★

In Lauren Yee’s dark comedy Mother Russia, the title character — played by the show-stealing David Turner — launches a series of provocative questions, including: “Have you ever loved a shitty man?”

It’s a rhetorical question for nearly everyone in the audience, and one that earns big laughs. She then doubles down with more familial angst: “You have kids? Never have kids. You are only as happy as your unhappiest child, and me? I have so many.”

From that savory prologue, the play jumps to two of those unhappy Russian children: Dmitri (Steven Boyer), pointing a gun at Evgeny (Adam Chanier-Berat). It’s 1992. Both young men are hungry and frustrated in the wake of the sweeping reforms jumpstarted by President Mikhail Gorbachev. Dmitri believes he would have been perfect for the KGB but now has no career path to follow. Evgeny, raised with the privileges accorded to children of party bigwigs, must now resort to hooliganism, a role for which he is wholly unsuited.

After an absurd attempt at shaking down Dmitri, Evgeny begs to serve as a spy for Dmitri’s fledgling surveillance business. Their sole subject: Katya (Rebecca Naomi Jones), a former pop singer now eking out a living as a teacher. Trailing her on her daily commute, Evgeny — unsurprisingly — falls in love. When she confronts him and he confesses that he knows her from her music days, she is unimpressed: “It’s so ironic how all you Soviet rich boys would come to my gigs, fawning, when you knew nothing about what I stood for.”

Where confusion reigns, complications follow — hilariously so.

Yee is clearly interested in how people behave amid the rise and fall of economic systems, how chaos erupts during times of structural instability, and how, after collapse, winners and losers emerge from the rubble (or, in this case, the ruble). Fortunately, the sharp, snappy humor of Mother Russia keeps it from feeling relentlessly pedagogical, as does the show’s peppy pace, buoyed by Teddy Bergman’s tight direction and Mikhail Fiksel’s superb sound design.

Given the show’s flirtations with farce (the swanning about to Swan Lake is delightful), its overly serious final turn feels slightly unearned. Despite that tonal hiccup, the spirited cast is terrific, and at just 90 minutes, this mother doesn’t overstay her welcome. As she so ably puts it: “I am not complaining! I am just making observations.”