Too Much Utopia

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

As “The Coast of Utopia” staggers into “Salvage,” the conclusion of Tom Stoppard’s dizzyingly ambitious trilogy, the broad array of Russian émigré philosophers has dwindled down to a handful of battle-scarred survivors. Their exhaustion is palpable, as one revolutionary dream after another has imploded.

Nearly as understandable — and to the faithful theatergoers who have spent the last several months ingesting hour upon hour of 19th century Russian political philoso phy, nearly as tragic — is the narrative fatigue that permeates this final chapter. What began last November as a triumphant melding of head and heart, a career-defining work for Mr. Stoppard and for director Jack O’Brien, has devolved into a visually rapturous but dramaturgically soggy series of lectures that too often let the play’s broader themes wriggle away.

As in “Shipwreck,” the trilogy’s similarly flawed middle play, this assemblage of agitators is headed by Alexander Herzen (Brían F O’Byrne, whose well-considered blend of intellectual fervor and personal detachment has deepened with each of the three pieces). Herzen, who by 1853 had settled into affluent exile in London, has two qualities that presumably endeared him to Messrs. Stoppard and O’Brien: a tumultuous personal life and a sense of historical perspective that frequently eluded his more fiery comrades.

Nine years have passed since the conclusion of “Shipwreck,” the second play, and many of Herzen’s fellow radicals are dead. The others have largely abdicated their passion for change. The famed novelist Ivan Turgenev (Jason Butler Harner) has become preoccupied with his bowels. Nicholas Ogarev (Josh Hamilton), Herzen’s collaborator on a populist Russian newspaper called the Bell, is consumed with his physical debilities and his increasingly messy domestic situation. (He memorably describes himself as “curably romantic.”) The “new generation” of nihilists and budding Bolsheviks take Herzen’s money and mock him. Only the devoted anarchist Michael Bakunin (Ethan Hawke), who has escaped from hard labor in Siberia, and to a lesser extent Ogarev exhibit a similar zeal among the original sextet.

And so it falls upon the humbled Herzen to give voice to his cohort’s diminished, marginalized state: “I imagined Nick Ogarev and my friends reading me by candlelight and beginning again to push back the night. But nothing stirs. The fortress doors have closed on our generation.”

Or when he describes the remaining circle of fellow reformers as “the flotsam of refugees, their moment missed … schemers, dreamers, monomaniacs from every failed insurrection from Sicily to the Baltic.”

Or when he speaks mournfully at the funeral of one such revolutionary about “the dying burying their dead. Failure piled upon loss.”

Several other quotes of his could just as easily be cited. All of them shimmer with wintry, hardearned melancholy, burnished by Mr. Stoppard’s fine ear for paradox and Mr. O’Byrne’s reasoned performance — and nearly all of them could be used interchangeably from one scene to the next.

And so, despite covering a longer period of time than the other two plays, a period that included the death of Tsar Nicholas I and the subsequent emancipation of Russia’s serfs, “Salvage” finds itself running in place, content to bask in its beautiful stage pictures (anchored by Natasha Katz’s exquisite lighting) and its terrific cast. It has spies, infidelities, a potty-mouthed Karl Marx, yet another stunning epic-theater set by Bob Crowley and Scott Pask, and tons of facial hair (Mr. O’Brien’s preferred way of turning 30-somethings into 50-somethings). What “Salvage” lacks is a compelling refraction of its characters’ chaotic personal lives through these sociopolitical upheavals. That’s what “Voyage,” the first third of “The Coast of Utopia,” did so brilliantly. And as someone who hailed that play as “the most exciting theatrical event Broadway has seen in a long, long time,” I find it hard not to share in Herzen’s disappointment, the emotional and mental weariness that comes from witnessing so much promise remain unrealized.

The original London production in 2002 unveiled all three plays at once, whereas Lincoln Center Theater has staggered their openings over the last three months. (Sameday marathon sessions of the trilogy begin this weekend.) That’s a long time to retain so much historical information, but the act of juggling so much exposition from “Voyage” and “Shipwreck” repeatedly gets the better of Mr. Stoppard. “Salvage” gets off to a deadly start with a dream sequence, of all things, in which Herzen conjures up a bunch of melancholy relatives and sniping philosophers, accompanied by music-hall piano. Passages of “Coast” have been repetitive or insufficiently dramatized before, but Mr. Stoppard’s dutiful dot-connecting via whimsy is the first truly awful stretch in the entire trilogy.

Things certainly improve from there, but only rarely do Messrs. Stoppard and O’Brien come near the highs of the first play. Cluttered group tableaux seem to exist solely to justify the expense of Mr. O’Brien’s enormous cast, and the epochal historical events depicted here carry little of the emotional weight that accompanied the abortive French Revolution of 1848 in “Shipwreck.” The domestic scenes — a love triangle among Herzen, Ogarev, and Ogarev’s wife, Natasha (Martha Plimpton), that is complicated further by the arrival of his live-in mistress (Kellie Overbey) — restore some of the dramatic tension, but too much stage time is ceded to Herzen’s children, played by an indifferently staged group of performers.

Along with this focus on the children comes a muffling of many of the trilogy’s most dynamic performers. Billy Crudup, whose Vissarion Belinsky proved the most entertaining of the original sextet, is AWOL here. Jennifer Ehle and David Harbour, who provided emotional ballast for the first two plays as two very different sets of lovers, are still around but in lesser roles. Ms. Ehle, last seen as Herzen’s doomed wife, has returned in the thankless role of Malwida von Meysenbug, a stern German nanny who inveigles her way into his domestic life. (The real-life Malwida was far more interesting, the sort of galvanizing intellectual force who met Friedrich Nietszche through their mutual friend Richard Wagner.) Mr. Harbour, by contrast, is given the juicier but even smaller role of Bazarov, a proto-nihilist whose chance encounter with Turgenev spurs the writing of “Fathers and Sons.”

And so the action returns to Herzen’s sad and splintered home. “Don’t look for solutions in this book,” he implores his son upon the long-awaited publication of his “From the Other Shore” in their native Russian. “There are none. The coming revolution is the only religion I pass on to you, and it’s a religion without a paradise on the other shore. But do not remain on this shore. Better to perish.”

As we saw in “Shipwreck,” Herzen’s mother and another son have already perished at sea; as we do not see, Herzen himself will be dead within two years of the period depicted in “Salvage,” and one of his teenagers will commit suicide shortly thereafter. So much passion, so much ambition, so much intellectual confidence — all gone. It is a condition that is sadly familiar by the end of “The Coast of Utopia,” which arrived on our shores with the force of a tidal wave and since then has steadily receded into the depths.

Until May 13 (150 W. 65th St. at Broadway, 212-239-6200).


The New York Sun

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