Orphans for the Czar
ruefully exposes the duplicity, revenge, and self-interest at the core of a culture about to go up in flames. Suggested by Gorsky's novel
The Life of a Useless Man
and set shortly before Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg, the play focuses on a hapless double agent as he tries to stay on the right side of both the revolutionaries and the czarists. The orphaned fool Vasley leaves his impoverished village to work in his uncle's bookstore in the city, and becomes engrossed by the women, the intelligentsia, the spies, and all their conflicting ideologies. A comedy of pathos about the fragility of people in unstable times,
is also a plea for the possibility of decency.