An Epic Journey

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The New York Sun

Ambition, doomed and glorious, informs every word and action of the sextet at the center of “The Coast of Utopia,” Tom Stoppard’s nine-hour epic that began last night with the opening of “Voyage,” the first of three linked plays. A sort of Greatest Generation of tsarist Russia, the likes of Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Herzen, and other, lesser-known philosophers spent a good-size chunk of the 19th century agitating for reform — a crusade that led inexorably to betrayal, death, and the obliteration of one lofty dream after another.

Mr. Stoppard, never one to shrink from a challenge, has put his formidable intellect to the test in harnessing these men’s chaotic political, intellectual, and personal lives into a viable narrative. As evidenced by the first play (Part II, “Shipwreck,” opens next month, followed by “Salvage” in February), he has swung for the fences and — along with his equally ambitious director, Jack O’Brien, and a marvelous cast — connected with towering success.

By focusing on the blind spots and emotional underpinnings of the philosophies at the play’s center, Messrs. Stoppard and O’Brien have united head and heart with a mastery that makes “The Coast of Utopia,” at least so far, the most exciting theatrical event Broadway has seen in a long, long time.

Each of the plays is built around one of the six central intellectuals, and “Voyage” rests on the excitable shoulders of Michael Bakunin (Ethan Hawke, the only real weak link in the 36-member cast). In time Bakunin will gain notoriety as an anarchist, but at the play’s start he’s a meddlesome narcissist whose philosophical interpretations invariably endorse his own narcissism.”I got led astray by Schelling,”he grumbles to his sister Liubov (Jennifer Ehle).” He tried to make the Self just another part of the world — but now Fichte shows that the world doesn’t exist except where I meet it — there is nothing but Self.”

Wait, Fichte? Schelling? Are we going to be tested on all this?

Not to worry: While Mr. Stoppard has certainly done his homework and is proud of it, he has tempered the torrent of verbiage with poignant strains of loss and regret. The play gets off to an unpromising start as the precocious Bakunin sisters entertain their dinner guests in a Babel of foreign languages. But this first, rather distancing glimpse is misleading: With their shifting allegiances and their romantic frustrations, the family could be mistaken for Austen’s Bennets or Alcott’s Marches as easily as for Chekhov’s three Prozorov sisters.

Chekhov saddled his trio with a failed intellectual and a cuckold for a brother; at least Michael, for all his misdirected bluster, keeps good company. Fichte and Schelling don’t visit Premukhino, the Bakunins’ country estate, but two of Michael’s peers do. Nikolai Stankevich (a terrific David Harbour) is well versed in Kant’s theories of rational understanding but at a complete loss around women, particularly the lovestruck Liubov. Equally uncomfortable is the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky (Billy Crudup), who is prone to fiery declamations on the sorry state of Russian culture in between awkward flirtations.

These theories reverberate beyond Premukhino, and “Voyage” doubles back in Act II to revisit the same period in a different location, this time in the intellectual hotbeds of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Here Mr. Stoppard’s gift for illuminating plot points from various angles moves to the forefront, as he and Mr. O’Brien revisit everything from Belinsky’s literary manifestos (“Literature can replace, can actually become … Russia”) to a lost penknife with wounding clarity. The political is always personal, even (or especially) for those who most vehemently profess immunity to the dictates of their own hearts.

This level of complexity, along with the sheer glut of material, requires an occasional bit of epic-theatre shorthand on the creators’ part — I’d advise against becoming too emotionally invested in any character that coughs more than once. But as with any of Mr. Stoppard’s finest works, the heady perorations give way to emotional richness with surprising potency, as when the Bakunin patriarch, Alexander (Richard Easton), holds a heartsick daughter in his arms and comes to halting terms with the era’s turmoil: “How the world must have been changing while I was holding it still.”

And there is much, much more to come: We are offered only tantalizing glimpses of Turgenev (Jason Butler Harner), Herzen (Brian F. O’Byrne), and Nicholas Ogarev (Josh Hamilton), all of whom will take on increasingly prominent roles in the trilogy.

As each of these characters learns, Utopia does not exist. And if you search for it long enough, treading water in the vain hope of reaching an ever receding shoreline, you will eventually drown. Mr. O’Brien opens “Voyage” with a gorgeous visual that foreshadows such a fate for one major character, and the death of Pushkin — a near-deity for much of mid-19th-century Russia — casts an autumnal pall over the play. A few other characters don’t make it out of “Voyage” alive; while some of the production’s finest actors have been cast in these roles, they will rejoin the epic as different characters.

“Voyage”ends in 1844, fewer than 20 years before Tsar Alexander II freed some 50 million serfs — more than 80 percent of the country’s population.(As we’ll see, Turgenev’s writings played a major role in this decision.) At times, it seems as if most of those 50 million are looming on the Vivian Beaumont stage: Mr. O’Brien has cunningly used a combination of live actors and mannequins to flood the background with scores of “souls,” as the blinkered gentry refers to its indentured population. The effect is only of several coups de theatre by set designers Bob Crowley and Scott Pask, and Brian MacDevitt’s stunning lighting design equals the quality of their work here and throughout.

The cast includes several Stoppard veterans, each of whom seizes on delicious new angles to past successes. Ms. Ehle, all poise and certainty in 2000’s Broadway revival of “The Real Thing,” dazzles as the far less assured Liubov. (She won a Tony in 2000 and is even better here.) Mr. Easton’s Alexander Bakunin is as emphatic as his A.E. Housman was tentative in “The Invention of Love.” And Mr. Crudup, who launched his career as the Byronic tutor Septimus in “Arcadia,” is almost unrecognizable as the adenoidal, fidgety Belinsky, who describes his impetuous writings as “chaos, excess, and no mercy.”

They are joined by dozens of other excellent actors. Martha Plimpton and Kellie Overbey breathe vibrant life into the roles of two of Michael’s sisters, while David Pittu and David Cromwell are both strong as lesser lights among Moscow’s pamphleteering class. Unfortunately, the outmatched Mr. Hawke’s flat-voweled delivery and shrill line readings convey Michael’s boorishness all too well.

The exquisite final scene, as two generations of Bakunins stare blankly over their long-gone Premukhino forest at dusk, contains Mr. Stoppard’s most blatant nod to Chekhov. Alongside the chaos and excess rests a chilly, heartrending mercy. As “Voyage” comes to its wistful close, the philosophers and budding revolutionaries are converging in Europe, just in time for the aborted revolutions of 1848. Great things are expected from them. History and the foibles of human weakness will ultimately dash these expectations, but greatness can still be found in this meaty, magisterial, and unmissable work.

In repertory until March 10 (150 W. 65th St., at Broadway, 212-239-6200).


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