The play, which will be translated in New York through headphones, tells the story of the degradations of Stalin's Russia. Those are by now numbingly well known, but Marina Neyolova, as Ginzburg, manages to express the true astonishment and shock she feels at what has become of her and, by implication, of so many like her. She watches hopelessly, both a victim and a bystander, as she loses her family, listens to friends and colleagues as they inform on her, but never fully succumbs to her fate.

''When I first read the book, it was like nothing I had ever seen before,'' Ms. Neyolova said. The wife of a Russian diplomat, she now lives in Paris but travels to Russia frequently and often performs in the play, as she will in New York. ''It is so much like a horrid fantasy but it is true. I feel some responsibility to try and bring the story before anyone who will see it.

''It is, after all, the biography of our country. And for Russia, where communism was not so long ago and is not yet dead, this is not just a play. It is the tears and hopes of all my country. It is our blood.''

The wrenching details of the prison lives of the women with whom Ginzburg was herded across Russia in a cattle car to the Gulag are examined with poignant intimacy. Anger, jealousy hatred and love -- the mixed emotions of a country in revolution -- emerge through the personal communications of a dozen women who share a horrid fate.

In the play, the imprisoned Ginzburg manages to be elegant, aloof and deeply wounded all at once. She was an intellectual, always a sin in the Soviet Union. Her son, Vasily Aksyonov, who now lives in Washington, has become one of his generation's best writers. She was imprisoned for supporting Stalin's great enemy, Leon Trotsky; she was a journalist who was forced to write favorably about Trotsky when he was in power. The play ends as the women are about to leave for Siberia, having lost all appeals.

But they have not lost all hope. The year is 1938 and Lavrenty P. Beria has just been appointed as the head of the K.G.B. The women are happy, because they assume that he will make life better for them. It was impossible to imagine he could make things worse.

''It is a bitter irony of course,'' said Ms. Volchek, who has been the artistic director of the company since its founding. ''Their trials had just begun. Beria turned out to be the most brutal killer of a brutal era.''