The actors in Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty wait onstage for the audience to enter…. Sitting casually against the large metal backdrop, eighteen youths talk in undertones, chew gum, smoke and stare indifferently or defiantly at the people who are joining them in the hall.

Cramped and restless, the actors are very close to the audience, practically within reach of the first row of seats. This first row is reserved. The audience, settling into place, has the time and proximity to absorb details of set and costume on the shallow stage…. This is American Youth as the Moscow audience might expect it to be, but the actors would probably strike the American viewer as middle-aged and dated, belonging more to the Beat Generation than to today's counter-culture….

The main presence in the theatre is the metal backdrop, which replaces a curtain. All of the action of the performance takes place in front of this backdrop. Seamed together from sturdy sections of flat and corrugated metal, it creates a cold and urban setting. The last two words of a slogan, the WAR, painted in large, white English letters at the extreme left, leave to the imagination the beginning of the slogan and the extension of the metal curtain beyond the dimensions of the stage and theatre. (p. 138)

What we see and hear on stage is a series of enactments of political events or of events that are portrayed as central to the American Experience. (p. 139)

[Violence] alternates with less devastating skits. Some seem irrelevant, like a barker selling lottery tickets. Others strike the American viewer as on target, such as when a Gallup pollster, using the rope as a microphone, puts questions to Americans on the street who are handily portrayed by the four skulls….

When the students play themselves, Yevtushenko's treatment is sympathetic, and the youth movement is depicted as a helpless, desperate attempt to reclaim innocence. Dr. Spock, "wiser than us all," emerges as a hero because he knows that parents should be treated for the diseases of childhood.

In the blending of old and new Yevtushenko verse, the male actors imitate the delivery style of Yevtushenko himself, whose image is present onstage in the form of a poster announcing the American concert tour of "Yevtushenko and Friends." To the American spectator, the declamation of poetry makes the character onstage impossible to identify with. The American viewer becomes acutely aware that the actor before him is a Soviet youth in American blue-jeans.

The effect on the Soviet theatregoer is much different, and hard for an American to assess. The performance of poetry, a Soviet phenomenon, is central to the experience of Soviet youth…. Such performances have had an impact on Soviet youth culture that might be compared with that of rock festivals in America. Many lines of Yevtushenko poetry revived in Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty are as familiar to the Moscow audience as lyrics of rock hits might be to a young American audience. This familiarity adds a note of nostalgia to the performance, for the height of Yevtushenko's popularity and visibility to the Soviet public passed with the sixties.

Some Western critics interpret the fact that Yevtushenko has chosen to portray Americans through a wholly Soviet art form as one more indication that the moral action of Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty is not set in America at all. References to listening through walls, the recreation of Dostoevsky's character Raskalnikov, and even the presence onstage of a metal backdrop that could suggest an "Iron Curtain" might convince such critics that political innuendos of the play cut two ways, that there are anti-Soviet as well as anti-American elements. Some American viewers have concluded that Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty is actually a thinly disguised anti-Soviet production. (p. 141)

The play is considered controversial,… [but Muscovites] seem to feel that its controversy stems from the play's anti-American implications at a time of official détente, not from anti-Soviet intentions.

Yevtushenko clearly does intend to reach beyond exclusively American experiences for more universal meaning, although his symbolism becomes ambiguous in the attempt. He blurs ideological lines with the token presence of non-American characters such as Raskalnikov and Pancho Villa, with the portrayal of positive American heroes such as Dr. Spock and President Kennedy, and with references to literary truisms, as Donne's "Ask not for whom the bell tolls …" America's various shames are actualized on the stage, but it is the Russian and fictional murderer Raskalnikov who smashes an ax into the symbolic skulls. All men kill that which they fear, all men murder that which causes them shame, Yevtushenko seems to be saying in his portrayal of American youth's search for innocence and redemption. (pp. 141-42)