Blackwell’s ‘Hunger’ suffers in the translation at Lifeline Theatre

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Ilya (John Henry Roberts) and Alena (Kendra Thulin) face an uncertain future as the siege of Leningrad drags on during the winter of 1941-42 in Lifeline Theatre’s production of “Hunger.”

Updated: March 16, 2012 8:07AM

It was, to be sure, the very worst of times. For close to 900 days, from early September, 1941, through mid-January, 1944, the Soviet city of Leningrad was the focus of a massive Nazi military operation that saw all connections to the city severed.

The siege caused the most enormous destruction and loss of life (more than 600,000 civilian casualties alone) ever experienced by a modern city, with massive starvation and freezing winters leaving millions of others sick and wounded, with some even resorting to cannibalism to survive. And ironically enough, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s homegrown reign of terror savaged whatever the enemy and the elements failed to destroy.

All this forms the backdrop for “Hunger,” Lifeline Theatre’s hugely ambitious but too often heavy-handed stage adaptation of a 2008 novel by American writer Elise Blackwell that homes in on how the siege affected a unique group of scientists during that nightmarish period. Adapted by Chris Hainsworth and directed by Robert Kauzlaric, the production brings to light a horrific moment in history few know or think about these days. But it ends up feeling like the most wooden of socialist realist dramas.

“Deprivation debases more often than it ennobles,” says Ilya (John Henry Roberts), one of the botanists among a group of researchers who are preserving a precious cache of seeds from around the globe that could yield secrets for the more efficient production of food. And just who will sell out, who will take a moral stand and who will survive is at the heart of the story here.

The botanists who work at this particular lab (the fine set design is by Jessica Kuehnau) are under intellectual siege even before the bombardment and other miseries begin. Their director (Christopher M. Walsh), has refused to give in to Stalin’s unrealistic expectations, so the dictator has instead put his trust in Trofim Lysenko (an actual historical figure), the fraud who rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of spurious hybridization theories. Not only will the scientists now have no special official protection, but their personal loyalties and animosities will become magnified. Even their vow never to use the seeds for their own purposes (for food) will come under threat.

The research group is composed of Ilya’s bravely idealistic (and long heartbroken) wife, Alena (Kendra Thulin); Vitalli (Peter Greenberg), a former athlete whose body and spirit are broken; Sergei (Dan Granata), who early on is taken to jail; Lidia (Jenifer Tyler), who knows how to use sex to her advantage; and Efrosinia (Katie McLean Hainsworth), the mousy yet passionate woman who sees the endgame early on. Hainsworth nails Efrosinia with ideal subtlety and then returns in the second act, totally transformed, as Klavdiya, a steely apparatchik.

The strongest scene comes late in the play with a flashback to an early meeting between the long-estranged Ilya and Alena — the couple whose distinct destinies are already built into their natures.