“In the West, you have no idea,” says Boris Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg) at the top of Peter Morgan’s Patriots.  We think of Russia as cold, cruel, and bleak.  Russians think of “the beauty of snow on the rooftops—of eating ice cream in the freezing cold.”  The cruelty and the beauty are inseparable.

Patriots is about Berezovsky’s relationship to Vladimir Putin (Will Keen), so the line is also a promise of a story full the kind of KGB intrigue and authoritarian power that would amaze citizens of a democracy.  The promise is fulfilled—in part.  Berezovsky is a business oligarch who used his connections to facilitate Putin’s rise from Deputy Mayor of Saint Petersburg to the acting presidency of Russia.  His television station, ORT, helped sell him to the country.  After Putin won the 2000 election, their alliance soured, and he died of apparent suicide in 2013 while living broke and in exile in England.

Stuhlbarg is quite animated, and he channels a little of Richard III’s zaniness in his portrait of Berezovsky.  This could work.  Unfortunately, Morgan doesn’t seem to have found the story he wants to tell.  He has written a three-hour play that is spread too thin.  For example, he spends a great deal of time on Berezovsky’s early career as a mathematician, and there are scenes depicting his childhood training and his post-doctorate renunciation of the field.  His work is in decision-making theory, which is consistent with his life after academia.  Still, this information comes to us through dialogue rather than drama, slowing the action, and there is also a great deal of talk about “the limits of infinity,” which Morgan makes little effort to connect to the rest of the play.  These kinds of distractions give him less time to flesh out his central question of Berezovsky’s patriotism, less time to devote to his quixotic mission to “save” and “free the country we love.”

There are other problems, too.  Keen makes odd decisions about Putin, using the kind of cartoonish gestures we associate with parody.  Worse, most of Patriots consists of these characters speaking to or about each other.  A larger cast would have given the audience context and a better idea of their power.  As it is, we just have to take their word for it.

Patriots runs through June 23rd at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.  243 West 47th Street  New York, NY.  2 hours 50 minutes. One intermission. Photograph by Matthew Murphy.