Like Simon, I was completely absorbed by this grim and gritty portrait of the banality of evil Russian style. The three hours whizzed by with not a single temptation to check my watch.

While darkness does indeed prevail, this production is not without its humorous moments. With business headlines awash in talk about interest rates and former Federal Reserve Czar Alan Greenspan all over the home screen plugging his memoir, one scene adds an especially hilarious comic touch. It's an interchange in the last scene before the intermission, when the gruff old soldier Mitrich tries to educate Nikita's pious father Akim on this subject. He couches his economics lesson in an example of a farmer borrowing ten ruples from a friend to see him through the planting season but having to repay the loan with three extra ruples. He brushes aside Akim's protest that this is against God's wishes by expanding the example to describe a woman who has some money lying around and asks the man who turned ten ruples into thirteen to make some interest with her money and he then makes another loan, but with her money. As Mitrich sums this up "Well, then — that's what a bank is. It's a clever business- it doesn't make anything that's useful — there's no hide, there's no milk, there's no meat to feed you at the end of the day. It's just money made out of money." Maybe Jonathan Bank ought to invite Mr. Greenspan to take a break from his book tour to see The Power of Darkness.

Set designer Bill Clarke also deserves an extra round of applause not just for the amazingly smooth transitions from indoor to outdoors but for the way he has transformed the entire theater into Tolstoy's landscape, with the walls and support poles wrapped in a birch tree-like fabric.

Mint fans will also want to mark their calendar for October 29th to catch a special one-night reading of another Russian work, The Bachelor by Ivan Turgenev. It will be directed by Jason Butler Harner who spent last season as Turgenev in The Coast of Utopia. The next fully staged play will be the first production of Ernest Hemingway's The Fifth Column, not the heavily edited version you may have seen, but the original. It will be directed by the Mint's own Jonathan Bank.