["The Idiots Karamazov"] is, more or less, a musical comedy based on "The Brothers Karamazov," which is enough to make Dostoyevsky turn over in his grave. Actually there is nothing grave about this antic undertaking. A travesty by Christopher Durang and Albert F. Innaurato,… it is as precocious as it sounds—but it also has moments of comic inspiration….

The script is riddled with literary allusions and intellectual jokes. This is a lampoon not only of Dostoyevsky, but also of all Western literature.

The star role is the translator, Constance Garnett…. [She] is a daft old witch (the play is daft, too) in a wheelchair, attended by a butler named Ernest, who eventually blows his brains out. Absent mindedly, Miss Garnett leads us through the Karamazov saga, offering absurd footnotes and marginalia (such as the conjugation of the verb Karamazov).

The brothers' mother is named Mary Tyrone Karamazov...