It’s hard to imagine a literary classic less suited for the stage. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, despite its dramatic title, is long on discourse and short on action. The story of a man who takes his radical ideology to its bloody extreme is less about the murder he commits than about the moral anguish he subsequently undergoes. In print, that obviously has not presented a problem. Onstage, though, all that internal indecision has the potential to be pretty yawn-inducing.

Not so with Center Stage’s current production. The 90-minute intermission-free play is a creative, ambitious take on the novel. And interestingly, this adaptation, by Curt Columbus and Marilyn Campbell, actually strips the story down to its bare bones, rather than attempting to heighten the action. Raskolnikov (Eric Feldman), an impoverished student who has abandoned his studies, lives in a St. Petersburg tenement. He has been selling off his belongings to a pawnbroker, an old woman he detests. He decides to kill her and take her money, arguing that some people are superior to others and even have the right to commit murder if it allows them to accomplish something for the betterment of the world. Along the way he meets Sonia (Lauren Culpepper), a prostitute who sells herself to support her family, and Sonia’s father (John Leonard Thompson), a shiftless drunk who eventually dies. (In his case, Raskolnikov is sympathetic, and donates all his money for the funeral.) Following the murder—from which Raskolnikov obtains little money—Porfiry (also Thompson), a detective, tries to extract a confession from Raskolnikov.

Missing from the production are a suite of other characters who appear in the book, including Raskolnikov’s mother—who does appear here, but only as a memory—his sister, various admirers of his sister’s, and his friend Razumihin. The remaining characters—barring Raskolnikov—are all played by Culpepper and Thompson. With minimal costume changes, Thompson is both the inspector and Sonia’s father. Culpepper morphs from Sonia to the old pawnbroker to the old pawnbroker’s half-sister to Raskolnikov’s mother. The result is so intimate as to be suffocating, as Raskolnikov grapples with what he has done in the company of a small revolving cast that, through the members’ resemblance to one another, seems only to illuminate his lack of empathy and the limits of his utilitarian outlook.

Feldman does a fine job as Raskolnikov, a man with a “heart unhinged by theories,” as Porfiry puts it. He begins with the self-assurance and bravado of a young man caught up in the thrall of his ideas, and is by the end a nervous, self-destructive wreck, having begun to doubt them. In a state of perpetual unease—which gives rise to a good deal of pacing and gesticulating—he bursts periodically into rants that are the most visible indication of the battle within. As his interrogator, Thompson is brilliant; the play’s only funny moments come during the bait and switch he performs in an attempt to draw out a confession. At one point, Porfiry speaks admiringly of an essay of Raskolnikov’s. “Are there a lot of these extraordinary people who have a right to kill?” he asks, as if purely out of philosophical interest. Raskolnikov responds that there are very few. “Could I be one? Could you?” Porfiry muses, as Raskolnikov grows ever more tense.

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