In a nondescript Towson University conference room, the rehearsal for Yelena Gremina’s One Hour Eighteen Minutes, making its English-language debut in Baltimore, is underway. It looks less like a rehearsal than a press conference. Microphones are set up on the desks. The actors’ voices echo through portable speakers.

Yury Urnov, a ponytailed Russian director completing his second year as a Baltimore-based Fulbright Scholar, explains the setup. Hour is an investigation into the death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer who was arrested after uncovering an embezzlement scheme by Russian officials. He died in pretrial detention, where he spent a year with a fatal combination of poor health, a freezing prison cell, and a corrupt judicial system. The plot is straightforward: Representatives of that system—guards, judges, and prison doctors—are interrogated about the facts surrounding his untimely death at 37. Some scenes are documented, others fictional.

Sitting behind desks, actor (and co-translator of the play, with Urnov) Stephen Nunns reads from the script. At the moment, he’s playing a distracted investigator, who is fiddling with his cell phone while the hapless Magnitsky is dying of “unknown causes” in a prison cell a few meters away. The investigator is wrapped up in the eternal question: Nokia or Seimens?

“Seimens is dead in the fucking water,” he reads. “The vibrate mode is useless. I can’t feel it when I’m walking, even if it’s in my fucking pocket. And it constantly freezes up. I mean, what the fuck?”

Another cell phone rings at the other end of the rehearsal space. It’s Urnov’s brother from Russia, wishing him a happy 35th birthday.

Nunns and Temple Crocker—two-thirds of the play’s cast, along with Shannon McPhee—use the call to take a five-minute break. Both juggle roles as minor players in the Russian judicial and prison bureaucracy. For the moment, the pair sits at a table with microphones, untangling mic cords and poring over the script, which is largely composed of “documentary material” culled from the actual investigation of Magnitsky’s death, as well as articles, letters, and interviews.

Russia, certainly, has spectacular stories to tell about injustice. It’s a country of eternal flames, hero cities, and prison camps, with a population that has been bulldozed by injustice and wounds, both self-inflicted and from outside sources. Joseph Stalin: 20 million killed, plus or minus a few million, who’s counting? The Nazis: 10-20 million killed. And in the 1970s, Americans rallied around the iconic resistors who became household names: Solzhenitsyn. Sakharov.

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