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NEW YORK -- There's a new chorus line on Broadway, but its members don't sing, dance or tell you their life stories.
The ensemble in Voyage (***1/2 out of four), the enchanting first chapter of Tom Stoppard's new historical trilogy The Coast Of Utopia, doesn't do or say anything, in fact. That's because it consists chiefly of mannequins, who through much of the production at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre are only faintly visible behind an enormous scrim in Bob Crowley and Scott Pask's starkly gorgeous set.
But these figures speak volumes with their silence. They represent the Russian underclass in the 1830s and '40s, a time when Czar Nicholas I and much of the gentry seemed impervious to both the struggles of the less fortunate and the new ideas taking shape among a group of revolution-minded thinkers.
These radicals included rebel and eventual anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, novelist Ivan Turgenev, poet Nicholas Ogarev, literary critic Vissarion Belinsky and editor and socialist Alexander Herzen. As parlayed by the dynamic actors under Jack O'Brien's vigorous direction, their intellectual adventures are more diverting and exhilarating than any history lesson or high-tech musical you've sat through.
Much of the credit goes to Stoppard. Drawing on works by Herzen, Isaiah Berlin and E.H. Carr, he offers some of his most pungent and moving dialogue. The richly weighted relationships in Voyage and its powerful social conscience also nod to Chekhov and Tolstoy.
Stoppard's portrait of the effete complacency of the privileged set is infused with great wit. Richard Easton has many fine, funny moments as the arrogant patriarch Alexander Bakunin, while Jennifer Ehle, Martha Plimpton, Kellie Overbey and Annie Purcell amuse as his sometimes frivolous daughters.
Ethan Hawke turns in the most unsubtle performance as their brother Mikhail. Luckily, the actor's overzealous instincts are accommodated by his passionate, conflicted character.
Josh Hamilton and Jason Butler Harner deliver more nuanced interpretations of Ogarev and Turgenev, and Billy Crudup is typically riveting as the awkward but charismatic Belinsky.
Brian F. O'Byrne is more sedate but equally robust as Herzen, delivering some of the play's most affecting and illuminating lines. And David Harbour lends supple support as Nicholas Stankevich, a young philosopher.
Yet none of the players, however compelling, overshadow the veiled, quietly seething masses lurking behind them.
As Voyage ends, a serf -- one of "500 souls," as Alexander calls them, serving on the Bakunin estate -- finally moves forward and speaks, and his master observes, "The weather's due to turn."
But the journey will continue. Fasten your seat belts.
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