★★★★☆ The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of capitalism prove excellent fodder for Lauren Yee’s sharp new play
Steven Boyer, Adam Chanler-Berat, and Rebecca Naomi Jones in Mother Russia. Photo: HanJie Chow
Pay no attention to the woman in the babushka. “Don’t worry, I am no one,” she assures us. (She is someone.) She’s high up—she’s literally sitting on top of a building. And she’s important enough to refer to Gorbachev as “Misha.” She’s former actress—she played “all the cherries in the first production of Anton Chekhov’s seminal play Whatever Happened to Our Cherry Orchard, Mom?”—and longtime rival of “that slut Olga Knipper” (aka Chekhov’s wife). She’s a truth teller, a lie detector, and keeper of nearly 2,000 years of her country’s history. She is, in her own words, “history itself.”
Yet Mother Russia (played with pursed-lip perfection by David Turner) is only the narrator in Mother Russia, Lauren Yee’s farcical take on life in post-Soviet Russia. In Yee’s newest play, directed by Teddy Bergman, the main characters are childhood friends Dmitri (Kimberly Akimbo’s Steven Boyer) and Evgeny (Next to Normal’s Adam Chanler-Berat), a pair of 20-something capital-L Losers floundering in the free market: Marxist economist Evgeny lost his job in Moscow, so he’s returned to St. Petersburg to join the family business—extortion; Dmitri was forced to abandon his dream of becoming a KGB agent and set up a grotty convenience store in a hollowed-out storefront. “So I clean the blood off the walls and now this is my shop!” he says proudly.
Slight spoiler: The mousy Evgeny is really, really bad at shaking people down; and Dmitri’s not really selling chicken and condoms. The store is just a front for his surveillance biz. Since spy games sound much sexier than extortion, Evgeny decides to team up with his friend to listen in on former underground Russian pop star Katya (Rebecca Naomi Jones, whose character could use more stage time).
But the fall of communism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. McDonald’s is a luxury item. “I had to pawn off a bit of mother’s good silver and then wait three hours in line,” Evgeny says of the single Filet-o-Fish that the pair devour. (“Is this what capitalism tastes like?” muses Dmitri.) On the one hand: “We’re free! The world is ours,” proclaims Dmitri. On the other: “The yawning abyss of tomorrow is before us,” replies Evgeny.
Don’t know anything about Russian history? Mother Russia is here to help. “I have seen it before. It is all the same,” she sighs, before launching into a “We Didn’t Start the Fire”–style monologue that begins with “a war, and then another war,” breezes through “Y2K: let us party like it’s 1382,” and ends with “Navalny.” Technically, she goes past the play’s setting of 1992. But one must acknowledge the current situation. (Feb. 24, 2026—one day after this play’s opening—marks the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.)
In a recent interview, Yee said she’d been “subconsciously writing a cycle of plays about communism in Asia over the 20th century,” referring to Cambodian Rock Band (Cambodia in the 1970s), The Great Leap (China, the 1980s), and now Mother Russia (the 1990s). I can’t wait to see where—and to what decade—she’ll travel next.
Mother Russia opened Feb. 23, 2026, at the Signature Theatre. Tickets and information: signaturetheatre.org