Property values: bad behavior in Russia's ruling class.(three plays)

Turgenev's little-known 1848 play "Fortune's Fool," now at the Music Box in an adaptation by Mike Poulton, has also been little known under two other titles, "One of the Family" and "A Poor Gentleman." But the current title resonates the most, because the play has to do with the way that both meanings of the word "fortune" -- fate and finances -- hinge and impinge on each other. Set at a Russian country estate on the day that its young mistress, Olga Petrovna (Enid Graham), along with her new husband, is coming back for the first time in nearly nine years to take possession of her childhood home, the play begins with the usual rushing around of bossy servants. Into the hubbub walks Kuzovkin (Alan Bates). He is a man with a vaguely proprietary air, but it's unclear whether he's a gentleman or a servant; his calm manner suggests that he doesn't have a job to do, and yet he's shabbily dressed, in a black frock coat that has seen better days. As he waits for Olga Petrovna, he finishes a game of chess with his neighbor, Ivanov (George Morfogen, on parole from "Oz"), and in his conversation we hear traces of both the slavishness and the sense of entitlement that form his character. When Ivanov wonders whether they should get out of the servants' way, Kuzovkin says, "They are only the servants, never forget we are the gentlemen." But he has, we discover, been living on the charity of Olga Petrovna's family for thirty years. He is concerned that her new husband may throw him out, and he hopes that Olga Petrovna, with whom he seems to have a bond that goes beyond what is stated in the play -- he remembers precisely how old she was, down to the month, when her mother died and she went to live with an aunt in St. Petersburg -- will speak up for him if need be.

The mystery of the exact nature of his connection to Olga Petrovna deepens when she and her husband, Pavel Yeletsky (Benedick Bates, son of Alan) arrive and she greets Kuzovkin as Vassily Petrovitch, even though his name is Vassily Semyonitch. He tells Ivanov that the mixup means nothing, but we can't help noticing that Petrovitch and Petrovna are intriguingly similar. Still, the real drama, and the comedy, begins not with the arrival of the newlyweds but with the arrival of the estate's nosy, mischief-making neighbor, Tropatchov (Frank Langella), who flounces in uninvited -- if someone of Langella's Brobdingnagian stature can be said to flounce, and, based on the evidence, he can -- in order to check out the new owners. Tropatchov is both a clever observer of the social mores of the landed gentry and an "infamous, fatuous fop," as Kuzovkin later calls him, given to dispensing insincerities such as "My worst fear, my nightmare, is that you'll find us all so very dull -- so very, very dull, and you'll scurry away back to Petersburg, flippety floppety like a pair of little gray rabbits." (He could be the love child of Gore Vidal and Dame Edna.) For the rest of the play, which is directed by Arthur Penn (working on Broadway for the first time in twenty years), it is almost unnecessary for anyone else to appear on the stage with Langella and Bates, so completely do they dominate the evening. (Benedick Bates, who makes his Broadway debut in this play, is taller than his begetter but nevertheless falls under his shadow here.) Just as their characters represent the gamut of the negative qualities of the ruling class -- Tropatchov, with his smart red jacket and smart tongue, personifying energetic, destructive indolence, and Kuzovkin, with his supplicative, shambling manner, personifying passive, pathetic indolence -- Langella and Bates seem to use up all the acting possibilities in the play as they goad and react to each other.

In a drunken scene, questions are raised about Olga Petrovna's paternity (a scene that has as its highlight a long and deliberately tedious discourse by Kuzovkin about being robbed years before of the estate that was rightfully his, and the resulting Dickensian, or Gogolian, ...