The central gag is that life is so unbearable in the Soviet Union of the 1920s that the best way to surmount its indignities is to prove one’s worth by committing suicide. The setting is a miserable boarding house and the protagonist is one unemployed, hapless individual named Semyon Semyonovich Podeskalnikov, played effectively as the nebbish he is by Joey Slotnick. Semyon’s angry wife Masha, performed with ferocious comic anger by Jeanine Serralles, is the breadwinner, such as that can be amidst their poverty, and Semyon feels totally inadequate. He threatens suicide, if he can summon the courage.

What develops is a battery of cheering boarders and others who goad Semyon on, seeing his grand gesture as a way of gaining glory themselves within a system that offers them none. Semyon will become their hero. There is also the opportunity for some to gain financially, as with his grasping, nasty mother-in-law Serafima (Mary Beth Peil), who will reap donations from those feeling obliged to contribute survival money. The local priest, Father Yelpidy (Peter Maloney), can preach a pompous sermon. Alexander (CJ Wilson) can achieve importance as an organizer and take a rake-off on any funds coming in.

There is an entourage of other characters, including a pretentious poet wanting to write the ode to Semyon, a cloying woman doting over him and wanting to be remembered as his lover, a postman who has been meaninglessly honored as a heroic worker, a woman who has earned her livelihood with sex etc. By the time Semyon is to take action, his wife has left him, but we assume she’ll turn up again.

Semyon has some good scenes in which he exhibits bravado as he feels the courage to kill himself with the gun he possesses and expresses the self-confidence he has never had. But at the same time he shows an inner qualm about leaving this life without assurances that there is an afterlife. The groundwork is laid for all of the surprises and hilarious scenes and confrontations to come. They are better left without advance detail, so your enjoyment can be heightened when you see the play.

The writing is peppered with lines laying bare ideology and clichés, such as looking at a woman in a politically correct Soviet light, thereby honoring her by rendering her plain and unattractive. The dialogue is consistently clever in what may now on occasion seem heavy-handed but at the time could have made Soviet officials furious.