My Big Land, the Soviet play being presented in Russian by the Moscow Art Theater School at the Public Theater, is so thought-provoking that the mind continually flits from the play on hand to the heavy-handed world in which it was created 30 years ago.

The drama by Aleksandr Galich is about Jews in the Soviet Union, specifically about Jews from a town in the Ukraine. The story sprawls through three acts that take the audience from the late 1920s through the paranoid days of mid-30s Moscow and to the grim Holocaust years of World War II.

The central figures are David Shvartz, a young man who gives great promise of being a virtuoso violinist, and his father, Abram, a heavy drinker who seems to be in business of a very marginal sort. The father's ambitions rest entirely in the future of his son, who is sensitive and self-centered where the parent is plebeian, outspoken and given to expressing his emotions loudly and embarrassingly.

Into their lives flow a stream of people: an old friend, just returned in 1929 from Palestine, where he felt he had nothing in common with Zion; a rather benevolent commissar at David's music academy who says, "I believe that everything the Party does is singularly wise and, if I ever doubt that, I'll probably put a bullet through my head"; a neighborhood housewife who seems to be imbued with the most Yiddishkeit, or Jewish feeling, of anyone in the show (when she suspects the reticent returnee of having money, she says, "When Jews become officers, everybody stops saluting").

David goes to the Moscow school, where his best friend loses his scholarship and is ousted from the Communist youth organization because his father is an "enemy of the state." David's father visits, and comes across as an inept loudmouth bumpkin, bearing only money and love for the son. The third act finds David as a wounded officer encountering his yellow-starred father in a dream. The father was killed by the Nazis during a round-up in their hometown.

The curtain comes down on a sad song by the author called When I Return, with lyrics that tie everything together and imply that sons return to their fathers, and even authors to their people; it gives point to the roar of passing trains that punctuates the dialogue, creating a mood of transience that may or may not characterize the impermanence of Jewish life in hostile surroundings. The message is not that you can't go home again, but that you must. Mr. Galich, who died in exile in the 1970s, has written a play with characters who are fully dimensional humans rather than cardboard figures, and despite a tendency to avoid polemics, he has taken a strong moral stand in touchy circumstances.

The play is movingly acted by its young cast, under the direction of Oleg Tabakov, who acted in it in Moscow in 1958 until the censors closed it during dress rehearsals. The youthful players are sincere and passionate and persuasive; the sets, particularly the scene for the hospital train with its crowded cargo of wounded, are not spectacular but are the more real for that. Vladimir Mashkov, the 25-year old who plays the grizzled father, gives a stellar performance in a role that has had its counterpart here in immigrant theater dealing with the conflict between older newcomers and their American-born offspring.

... If there is a rhythm to the piece it is one of laconic quietudes broken by emotional outbursts, and it works very well. Each act has a short prologue that frames the action to come. (The excellent English translation is by Aleksandr Gelman.) Whatever the play lacks in dramatic continuity – there is a sporadic, episodic quality about it – is compensated by its intense and poetic manner.

There is something else striking about the play, which runs through Saturday: it is the knowledge that one is seeing in 1989 in New York a work that was suppressed in Moscow in 1958. It makes one wonder what the author was really saying at a time when Jews were scapegoats of a ruthless government, a dozen years after the leading lights of the Yiddish arts had been killed by order of Stalin.

It often seems as if the author is making the point that the Jew is like anyone else in his country, that he doesn't want to go to Palestine, that Jews can be as stupid as the next dolt, that Jews were not the only ones to bear the burden of Russian bigotry. But 30 years ago, Soviet writers knew caution; Jewish writers in particular had been charged not long before with being "rootless cosmopolitans" and of using "Aesopian" language.

A tendency to be critical of My Big Land because it plays down Jewishness even as it condemns anti-Semitism must be tempered by the knowledge that Galich had done a gutsy, anti-Government play, one that the Government honored by closing it. What may appear to be negative today might well have been forthright and positive – it certainly was daring – in the yesterday of its genesis.

My Big Land is a provocative play in which the idiom is not only Russian but also one that recalls a time when direct messages were sent at one's peril. It is as interesting theater as one can find in New York at the moment.