MAD WOMEN.("K.I. from 'Crime' " portraying pain of a women)

All is lost, all is lost. Poor Katerina Ivanovna has gone quite mad, singing and nattering on about her past. Maybe it's her grief. Her husband has just been killed--trampled by a horse-drawn carriage. Maybe it's her tuberculosis. It ravages the mind as cruelly as it ravages the body.

The words and music rush out of this sick woman like a terrible waking dream. Katerina is bullying her three young children into dancing alongside her for coins. She sings in broken French. She loves French because it is soft, genteel. She was married to an aristocrat once, an officer in the Russian Army--or perhaps that was her father. In any case, French is not Russian, which is Katerina's mother tongue, the language she has tried so hard to live in, here in St. Petersburg, where money and shelter are as elusive as privacy and salvation.

Katerina, a peripheral figure in Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment," enacts, through her very public breakdown, one of the novel's recurring themes: the loss of privacy. Characters are always rushing into one another's pitiful rooms to betray someone else's confidences, or themselves. Bodies become public spectacles, or property. Sonya, Katerina's eldest daughter, prostitutes herself in order to keep bread in the mouths of her mother and younger siblings, while she dreams of deliverance. She loses herself in religion. Katerina has no such refuge.

In "K.I. from 'Crime' " (at the Freight Entrance), the formidable Russian actress Oksana Mysina plays Katerina as the proudest woman imaginable. She is not asking for assistance but telling us what she needs. And we can't help but give her what her madness and her loneliness thrive on: our attention.

Staged in two small rooms--one steeped in shadows, the other blindingly white--the play, adapted from Dostoyevsky by the Lithuanian-born director Kama Ginkas and his son, Daniil Gink, who wrote the script, is essentially a monologue about desperation. Draped in a shapeless overcoat and wearing scuffed black shoes, Katerina bursts through a door into the dark room and fixes us with an urgent stare. She is shouting in Russian. (Much of the show is in Russian, which adds to the English speaker's sense of helplessness in the face of Katerina's misfortunes.) Into and out of the room she walks, over and over, slamming the door with each pass. Perhaps we are not the audience she expected. But we're all she has, and she more than makes do. Tenderly, she shows us a photograph of her father in uniform, and then slowly, more and more boldly, she begins to talk. She peppers her Russian with mangled French and rudimentary English. When some in the audience begin to recoil at this onslaught, this display of indignant and incomprehensible vitality, her eyes fill with tears. Why do people turn away, she seems to ask. Is it her poverty? Her illness?

Pride, in Mysina's interpretation, is all Katerina has. She clings to the faded glory of her tattered world. Fastening a red band around her arm--a reminder, perhaps, of her diseased state--she commands us, in English, to follow her into the white room, where there will be a dinner in honor of her husband. In Russia, she says, the dead are celebrated. But, sitting at the table, with a crust of bread and a half-empty bottle of vodka, she has nothing to offer us except her increasingly feverish speech, laced with insults. She badgers the three children into dancing again. She plays the violin, the bow unravelling in her hands, her blond hair spilling across her face in a web of loneliness. It's a searing performance, visceral, beyond language, the consummate expression of an unfathomable need. When Katerina's death comes--Ginkas stages it as a kind of redemption--it is a relief. She disappears up a ladder to Heaven, to the unknown.

These days, now that politics is synonymous with distrust, and blue-state voters live in a state of cynical disbelief, one can sense a liberal audience's ...