DOSTOEVSKI'S SHADOW : 'Notes from Underground' & 'Stavrogin'.

Fear rarely figures in the theater experience. I'm not talking about the frisson of suspense, or cathartic pity and terror, but real fear: the feeling that you may not make it through to the closing curtain alive.

But there was ample opportunity for trepidation, earlier this summer, in a tiny cellar-turned-stage on New York's Lower East Side. The occasion was a dramatized Notes from Underground, performed solo in near obscurity by actor Robert Honeywell, from a script by director Michael Gardner. During seventy-five minutes of delirious pacing, the actor lit and extinguished the candles that provided the only light. Since the space was awash in ink-blotted paper, bearing illegible scrawls, and since Honeywell's role involved skidding back and forth, candle in hand, sometimes barely keeping upright, the tiny audience, seated along the walls, had good reason to cringe. If a few hard-core Dostoevski enthusiasts had heard about this no-budget production, the New York City Fire Department, evidently, had not.

The audience, in short, was treated to a dose of angst to rival that of Dostoevski's chronically tortured protagonist. Of course, the quality of the distress was different: The "spiteful" narrator of the 1864 Notes suffers existentially, for no good reason except that he is. He wills his own misery, shunning comforts, deliberately alienating sympathy, and behaving irrationally, in order to prove to himself that he is free. Humans will choose choice over happiness, the Underground Man insists, and he glories in his anguish. Misgivings about a fire hazard can hardly compare.

And yet, Gardner's Notes did provide the audience with intriguing physical counterparts to the novel's metaphysics. Precarious candles were only the starting point; this Underground Man was really underground, after all, and while ranting about the "wall" (the limits of human behavior, as predicted by science and sociology), Honeywell was constantly running at full tilt into the walls.

And, to reproduce the book's tortuous monologue, riddled with contradictions and the objections of imagined listeners, Gardner had scripted lines for other voices, which mocked and interrupted the Underground Man's testimony. For the audience, the basement-theater began to feel like the inside of someone's mind-exactly what Gardner intended, as it happens. "The idea," he remarked in a postperformance interview, "was that, as much as theater is about interacting with people in the outside world, so it is about dealing with the voices inside one's head."

The idea may sound odd-we often think of theater as a medium for action-and Underground Man's dictum that the "fruit of consciousness is inertia" seems hardly stage-friendly. But what Dostoevski depicts in Notes from Underground-and what Gardner's production, to a certain extent, reproduces-is the drama of consciousness working its way toward either action or inertia.

Self-conscious people know the wrenching deliberations that can precede even trivial actions, like speaking up in a meeting. The drama that divides thought and action must be what T. S. Eliot meant when he wrote that "Between the idea/and the reality...falls the Shadow." The Shadow, the Underground Man would consider, is the experience of choice.

Dostoevski's works may be unlikely fodder for the stage. Most of his novels are sprawling, and their melodrama is knotted up in lengthy conversations about philosophical and theological concepts, or theories on the mystical identity of Russia. But his books do make their way before the footlights. Chicago's Lookingglass Theater Company scored a hit with a 1998 staging of The Idiot, and Atlanta's Actors' Express mounted an acclaimed The Devils last January, to name just two. Some readers do feel that Dostoevski's writing is intrinsically dramatic. Dostoevski and theater are "a perfect match" according to Gardner, who observes that, "as much as he's a philosopher, [Dostoevski] has an innate sense of how one scene connects to another."

Roughly concurrent with the cellar-bound Notes, New York's Storm Theater Company mounted Stavrogin's Confession, based on a censored chapter from The Devils (the director was Peter Dobbins). The scene, in which the antihero Stavrogin visits a monastery to confess to the rape of a child, was so controversial that it appeared in print only in 1922, after Dostoevski's death. Playwright and actor John Regis, who previously penned a Kabuki-influenced adaptation of The Idiot, has turned the episode into an intriguing one-act play that is quintessential Dostoevski: packed with thought and talk about crime, repentance, self-punishment, forgiveness, and pride.

As faultlessly portrayed by Laurence Drozd and Dan Berkey, respectively, Stavrogin and his idiosyncratic confessor, Bishop Tikhon, ushered the mysteries of sin and salvation into the tiny Red Room Theater (situated above an East Village bar). Are we responsible for each other's evil? When do abject remorse and the quest for suffering become a kind of pride? Baiting the monk and spinning out his own shocking confession, Stavrogin opened the floodgates to such questions, presenting the audience with an eerie uncertainty: Either the character was insane, or he was possessed by the devil. Playing a creepily elegant, tense Stavrogin, Drozd exploited this ambiguity; in one particularly effective moment, he lapsed into a trance, abandoning the stage to a pause that, as the seconds ticked by, began to seem increasingly uncanny. Regis, in discussing his play, has remarked on the sinister resonance the character of Dostoevski's nihilist has taken on since the Littleton shootout, and Stavrogin's Confession was indeed a wrenching meditation on how embodied the problem of evil can be.

"Is belief in the devil coupled with a complete indifference to God...more acceptable than complete disbelief?" the title character inquired of the bishop at one point. "No. Complete atheism is much more acceptable than such worldly indifference," the bishop retorts, and proceeds to quote Scripture: "Because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth."

The play, in which Tikhon critiques Stavrogin's confession on literary grounds, hints at an alternate, aesthetic interpretation for the quote. Risk-taking art, even when it doesn't quite succeed, even when it might appall the fire department, can satisfy more richly than the tidy, crafted kind-art that is safe, but just lukewarm.