Russian Transport

At the start of Russian Transport, an air mattress spontaneously inflates out of a cabinet and onto the living-room floor of a house in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. It’s a striking image, and hits just the right note of invasive tumescence for Erika Sheffer’s engrossing moral thriller. The play’s first scenes seem to promise a night of familiar domestic comedy, with a Russian-immigrant twist: Misha (Daniel Oreskes) is the put-upon papa, who runs a struggling car service; Diana (Janeane Garofalo) is his dour, bossy wife; Alex (Raviv Ullman) and Mira (Sarah Steele) are their bickering teenage kids. But with the arrival from abroad of Diana’s brother Boris (an impressive Morgan Spector), the family veers into ugly new territory.

A sexually charged sociopath, Boris is like a human pistol, fully cocked and calibrated, and Scott Elliott’s adept staging for his New Group—on Derek McLane’s clever two-level set—lingers on him as he changes clothes, his tightly muscled body a sign of twined appeal and menace. With ruthless post-Soviet self-interest, Boris has a transportation business too: He traffics in teenage girls, and soon Alex is doing his dirty work. (The excellent Steele, in a smart touch, plays three of the young victims.) The ensemble cast is convincing throughout, with one unfortunate exception: Though an accomplished comic performer onscreen, Garofalo makes an unsteady stage debut in this play, with a wavering accent and a seeming aversion to bold choices. In her key scenes, Russian Transport shifts gears to neutral; otherwise, it drives forcefully ahead on ever-twisting roads.