Video: Norbert Leo Butz & Francesca Faridany Explain What VLADIMIR Is All About

Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World

Two-time Tony Award winner, Norbert Leo Butts, is returning to the New York stage

in Manhattan Theatre Club's world premiere of Erica Schaeffer's play, Vladimir, directed by Daniel Sullivan

It begins performances on September 25th. We dropped by the rehearsal room to meet the company

I'm just so inspired by everybody and by the work in Erica Schaeffer has written a really good play

And it's a really timely play. and Dan Sullivan is so good at what he does

and we worked together years ago it's been years since I've been in a room with him apart from doing a workshop of this play

a year ago and I mean just meeting all of these wonderful actors

for the first time it's a thrilling thing and we've only been in the room for five six days

and it feels like months on the one hand but it also is very new

and we're learning all of these things and getting to know each other and it's just it's so exciting

I love it. I play a job journalist called Raya, and she's an independent journalist in Putin's Russia. But this is

20 years ago, so it's the beginning of his rise. And everyone still thinks there's hope for

democracy, perhaps, and there's hope for freedom of speech, and there's hope for protest. But

they're beginning to figure out that that's not true. And so she continues to speak out, and she

continues to find the voices of people who are voiceless and tell their stories

And she continues to oppose the regime. And she's so courageous and so relentless in that pursuit

And that is kind of all It utterly or so it was a no for me I haven done a play in a while now And I was looking for something to come back and do And this play really really spoke to me

We did a reading of it about a year ago, and I fell in love with it

I fell in love with Erica Schaeffer's writing. I loved her play, Russian Transport

She's excellent at dialogue. She's fantastic at political debate. And I always wanted to work with Dan Sullivan

He was a bucket list director for me, and so I'm thrilled to be in the room with him

I play a character named Kostia, and he is best friends with the central character

played by Francesca Ferradani, who's based on a real woman, a real journalist

who is persecuted under the Putin regime. And we play best friends

old dear friends. I'm her editor, she's my writer, and in the course of the play

their friendship is really tested because of the political environment. I think the play is about how the political is always personal

Political, especially authoritarian governments, present real challenges for families, for friends, for intimate relationships

especially when you fall on different sides of these binary political arguments

So it's a fantastic part. He's a guy who goes through a real disillusionment

and has to wrestle with his life's work. I play Yvgeny. Yvgeny is an accountant who comes across some irregularities

in government tax refunds and overcomes his initial sense of sort of reticence and self to sort of speak out and become a whistleblower in effect And he has this extraordinary sense of courage and of duty to his country and to his community

And that is something that I don't always share, and I really, really admire this man

And it's an honor to play him. The whole thing is really thrilling

This is a home for me. This is my third show here. I started out like you did

in city center, and then did the assembled parties on Broadway, and now I'm here with this

And then with this amazing cast, I worked with Dan on dinner with friends. Eric, I didn't know, but I'm just a complete fan of her play

And then everybody in the show, I'm just crazy about. So it is exciting

It's an exciting moment. I'm really happy. It's one of those shows where I feel like everybody in the show is better than me

So it makes me bring my A-game even more. so I love that challenge

You know, everybody's so good. And I just, you know, I want to honor that by bringing Maya game as well

Rehearsal has been kind of like a dream come true in a way

I worked with Daniels and understudy and Little Foxes seven years ago

And now to be in a rehearsal room with him seven years later is mind blowing to me

And I'm kind of just trying to soak it up as much as I can

I'm with all of these incredible, talented, wonderful people. so it feels like I'm going to camp every day

It's amazing. Being in the room with Dan Sullivan. I mean, it's incredible

It's funny because he's like, he's so quiet and then he speaks and you're like, oh

And it doesn't mean that like everything he says just like means more

Like if he like at the end of one day he was like you know I feeling really good about this And we were all like oh my God Like it going really well guys Yeah it really it yeah it really amazing

What unlocked the play for you to write? I think when I dove into the research about Vladimir Putin and his rise to power

I sort of realized like he was the least interesting person I was reading about

And it was sort of everybody else around him, the activists, the journalists, the everyday people

and their response to it that I found myself really fixated on

And so that's where my curiosity was, and that's sort of where I, the path I followed

This play is about a subject that I have found fascinating, which is it's about an entire country sort of caving to Vladimir Putin and why

What is there about this man that has kept his... All of the people in Russia, though there are many people who are working secretly against

Putin, but the country as a whole, it feels, to me at least, and I think you see the sense of it

in this play, have backed away from fighting against this sort of onslaught of Vladimir Putin

And this play sort of examines why that is