Multiple strands of the Globe’s work come together in tonight’s production.

First, as a Globe commission, Crime and Punishment, A Comedy is a testament to the robustness and range of our new-play development program. Here’s how it unfolded. We asked Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen to think about classics they might like to adapt for our stage. They came back with a short list. We talked and talked and then settled on this one. They wrote and rewrote. Then we workshopped a draft script, gathering talented actors together for a week so the authors could hear their material aloud. Some time later we did another workshop. Then we read the play in our Powers New Voices Festival, its first public airing. Then we committed to producing the play, which is now making its world premiere. At every stage of the process, Globe literary and artistic staff collaborated with Gordon and Steve, supporting their artistry to the best of our abilities and devoting to it the resources of our institution. This is how a major theatre company generates new work for the American stage, and our process, as sophisticated as any in the country, has met with these talented theatre artists to create something genuinely fresh and exciting.

Second, Crime and Punishment, A Comedy extends our relationships with Gordon and Steve into its sixth year (and in Gordon’s case, who’d been here way back in 2009, even longer). This, too, is a testament. It demonstrates the way a theatre company builds its family of artists. Every season we welcome new writers, directors, designers, and actors into our orbit, and some of these new talents come over time to regard the Globe as a home. American theatre artists are an itinerant bunch, and as such they are vulnerable to the vicissitudes of a field that is subjective and volatile by nature. The artistic home is a bulwark against that uncertainty, and it’s precious. We are proud of the many brilliant theatre makers we can host again and again, and whose careers we can support with the stability of a place to belong.

That Gordon and Steve have brought to their artistic home such a special work is of course the main point. Globe audiences have come to know them through their triumphant holiday show, Ebenezer Scrooge’s BIG San Diego Christmas Show. The theatrical vibrancy of that play is evident in abundance here. Parody, comedy, satire, and wit are the orders of the day, and the same bonkers sensibility that places a surfboard in the hands of Mr. Scrooge works its wonders in this play.

But to me what really distinguishes Crime and Punishment, A Comedy—and this represents a major step in the development of Gordon and Steve’s dramaturgical aesthetic—is that even as they wring laughs from their source material, they manage also to retain and even amplify its forceful moral substructure. Dostoevsky’s novel is renowned for many reasons, but its searing moral vision and its unsparing exploration of the toxicity of guilt are for me the source of its enduring power. This new take on the material keeps that aspect of the original always in its sights. That we are amused and unsettled by it in equal measure is a real triumph. Watching Gordon and Steve refine this doubleness as they’ve worked on the play has been remarkable: a source of pleasure, to be sure, but also a reason to celebrate two writers doing something unique and noteworthy. I’m proud of them, and of the Globe’s ability to nurture and care for their creativity.

One final thought: the Globe commissioned Gordon and Steve in 2020, two years before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That brutal military action has complicated the free world’s perspective on Russia, and has changed our thinking about its culture and arts. Our own San Diego Symphony, for example, was one of many orchestras worldwide to cancel a scheduled performance of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” lest it be misconstrued as a celebration of Russian militarism. The Globe has thought hard about whether, and how, we should alter our perspective on the swath of Russian literature that Gordon and Steve range across in this play: There’s Dostoevsky, of course, plus Chekhov, Tolstoy, and others. We concluded that these authors are not complicit in the destruction of Ukraine, nor are they collaborators with the current Russian regime. We can tell a century-old story set in Russia, laugh at Russian jokes, and empathize with the characters in a Russian classic, even as we despise the wretchedness that’s been so wantonly visited on the people of Ukraine. Indeed, it is to those people that we dedicate our work on this production.

Thanks for coming. Enjoy the show.