Entertainment

Don’t Russian to this drama

You’ll definitely want to review those program notes before watching “Neva,” the ponderous play by Chile’s Guillermo Calderón that just opened at the Public.

It’s set in a St. Petersburg theater in 1905 Russia, where actress Olga Knipper — widow of the great playwright Anton Chekhov — is preparing for a rehearsal of “The Cherry Orchard” even as Czarist soldiers are gunning down civilians in the streets. The question it asks is whether art is relevant during times of violent upheaval.

Based on this blend of absurdist comedy and stylized meditation, the answer is . . . meh.

Awaiting her colleagues, the insecure Olga frets,“This damn monologue is not coming out right. Rasputin is more truthful than I am.”

She’s soon joined by two other actors, Aleko (Luke Robertson) and Masha (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), who, as a warm-up for their performance, engage in such theatrical exercises as re-enacting Chekhov’s recent death from tuberculosis.

That is, when they’re not uttering self-conscious historical pronouncements — “The ninth of January 1905, remember that date,” intones Aleko — or ruminating about rather more earthy matters.

“Do you think I would be a better actress if I enjoyed sex?” Masha plaintively asks her colleagues, while Aleko delivers this head-scratcher to Olga: “The most important organ in my body is my appendix, and I want to stick it in your kidney and watch you sweat.”

That all of this is meant to be weightily significant is indicated by the playwright’s off-putting direction, in which the three black-clad characters are situated on a small raised platform featuring an ornate chair. The only light is provided by a bright footlight that, for a time, is pointed directly at the audience, as if to illuminate us and blind us at the same time.

It all culminates in a seemingly interminable monologue decrying theater by the revolutionary Masha — delivered by Bernstine, so impressive in “Ruined” a few seasons back, in bravura fashion — where the play’s themes are explicitly laid out for us in CliffsNotes-ese.

That said, the play has a few stirring and amusing moments, and the players handle the dense text, translated by Andrea Thome, with admirable intensity. But “Neva,” named for the river that flows through St. Petersburg, comes across as too self-satisfied for its own good, let alone ours.