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Nov. 28--One third into "The Coast of Utopia" and we are hooked. "Voyage," the first part of Tom Stoppard's absurdly audacious eight-and-a-quarter hour trilogy, finally opened last night and we cannot wait to get back to the Lincoln Center Theater in late December to find out what happens next to ... well, to the history of progressive thought in 19th century Russia.
To be more precise, we can't wait to reconnect with the people we have met and, especially, to see what theatrical wizardry awaits in Jack O'Brien's emotionally and visually amazing direction of Stoppard's prodigiously unwieldy monster of a play.
But first a warning. The first act is an ordeal. Before intermission, when Stoppard introduces the people and ideas that will drive the marathon into spring, the scene feels like a parody of "Masterpiece Theatre" on intellectual steroids. Set in 1833 through 1841 at the country estate of Alexander Bakunin -- father of Michael, the future anarchist -- this quasi-Chekhovian preface is crammed with so much dropping of names and philosophical theories that we flinch.
Even then, O'Brien's staggeringly beautiful, daringly cast production -- designed by Bob Crowley and Scott Pask, costumed by Catherine Zuber, lit by Brian MacDevitt -- lures us back for more. And what follows is the real beginning of nothing less than the idiosyncratic imagining of pre-revolutionary Russian thought, a gripping story of perfectability-of-mankind idealism and economic hypocrisy in the decades before and after the pan-European stirrings of 1848.
When all three plays opened together at London's National Theatre in 2002, we had the sense that Stoppard had more fun learning about the turbulent era than processing and writing about it. Missing from Trevor Nunn's diffuse production was the urgency that transformed research into three big, messy, relatively conventional plays.
Four years later, "Voyage" has been tightened and, though that first act will always be what it is, we already feel the vertiginous whip that connects the dots of history into enthralling drama. O'Brien, the ridiculously versatile director of this theater's "Henry IV" and Broadway's "Hairspray," has earlier turned up the heat on the heady intricacies of Stoppard's "Hapgood" and "The Invention of Love." Here, he immediately makes us aware of the ironic disconnect between privileged youths arguing theories about humanity and serfs who give them the luxury to philosophize. Such landowners as the Bakunin patriarch (the charismatic Richard Easton) quantify their estates, not in acres, but in numbers of "souls" -- that is, slaves. Meanwhile, frozen behind a scrim, stand the stooped, drab figures of the souls, invisible to the family in its romantic and cerebral frolics on a circular stage. Every so often, the perfectly pleasant-looking matriarch (Amy Irving) is seen beating one of these poor souls with a stick.
The temptation is to enumerate the extraordinary visual moments: the storm that disappears into a hole in the ground, a vision of Moscow that floats like a melting ice sculpture, the young Bakunin vanishing into exile on a boat, a glittering dress ball in St. Petersburg. Not to be overlooked, however, are the 44 actors in this massive adventure about the six young thinkers who meet at Moscow University and try to change the world.
Ethan Hawke wrestles admirably with the most difficult role, Michael Bakunin, a rich, foolish wastrel who changes philosophies of life with the fashion and loves his sisters, perhaps, too much. Billy Crudup has a febrile, wonderfully maladroit facility as Belinsky, the mouse-poor critic who lives for art. David Harbour brings muscularity to Stankevich's theories of illusion over reality. Josh Hamilton makes us look forward to the increased importance of poet Ogarev in later plays.
Brian F. O'Byrne -- first seen as an old man -- establishes the ultimate moral center of Alexander Herzen, who sees the contradictions between surface civility and oppression. And the actresses -- especially luminous Jennifer Ehle and Martha Plimpton -- struggle nobly against our unavoidable sense that these ecstatic young characters have wandered in from a Eurocentric Russian production of "Little Women."
Time travels forward, then back seven years and forward again in this world, where censors turn literary journals into life-and-death projects and philosophy is banned as "a threat to public order." In the heady compression of Stoppard's adventure, we come to accept that people talk incessantly about the "inner life" or gush, "You must read Hegel" or muse, "So the objective world is an illusion" or suggest, "Let's go eat oysters and talk of Kant."
Is there a theory to existence or, like the Ginger Cat at the costume ball, does fortune pick and choose without plan or purpose? Part 2 "Shipwreck" and part 3 "Salvage" await.
THE COAST OF UTOPIA, PART ONE: VOYAGE. By Tom Stoppard, directed by Jack O'Brien. Lincoln Center Theater. Tickets: $65-$100. Call 212-239-6200. Seen at Saturday afternoon preview.
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Copyright (c) 2006, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.
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