: Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness is a 1994 play by Tony Kushner, set in the USSR as it crumbles and during its later rebirth as a collection of independent states.

It later moved to the New York Theatre Workshop on 12 December 1994, in a production featuring Academy Award winner Marisa Tomei and Mischa Barton.

[1] The action begins in Moscow in March 1985 as Mikhail Gorbachev succeeds Konstantin Chernenko as general secretary of the Communist Party.

From beginning to end, it's also shot through with the kind of irony virtually unknown in today's theater, movies and television, where sarcasm passes for wit."

"[1] New York Magazine praised the performances of Wiseman and Barton, "a darling little girl, exhibits consummate charm even in delivering the kind of over-wrought rhetoric Kushner has everyone mouthing".