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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Coast of Utopia: Voyage — The Running of the Bolsheviks
By Harry Haun
29 Nov 2006
It looked like the revolution had started without me when I arrived super-early Nov. 27 for the opening at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre of Voyage, the first of three three-hour installments of The Coast of Utopia, Sir Tom Stoppard's sprawling human trilogy of the thought-filled 30-year lull in Russian history that came before the Bolshevik storm.
Rabble, a good 4,000 strong, filled Lincoln Center plaza — but they were a festive band of firebrands, I quickly deduced, full of holiday spirits, spirit and song. And those who remembered to bring torches were twirling and juggling them. The occasion was the lighting of the Lincoln Center Christmas tree — and neighboring courtyard trees. Once that order of business was taken care of, the crowd peacefully dispersed, and the first-nighters filtered into the Beaumont for a heady
evening of thought, words and deeds — Russian style, undeterred by pamphleteers in front of the theatre passing out negative comments in leaflet form about the play (Stoppage?).
Say this for the show's director, Jack O'Brien: He announces "Epic Tonight!" as soon as the curtain rises by marching all three dozen characters on stage en masse. (Voyage covers
the early years of the 19th century Russian "intelligentsia." In a kind of Chekhovian cavalcade, child actors are added to the mix, and the cast number increases to 44 for part two, Shipwreck, which bows Dec. 21, and part three Salvage, which opens Feb. 15; all three twirl in rep).
Standbys and understudies, dressed in grimy gray, also work as a serfs. A sculptured forest of serfs — Bob Crowley and Scott Pask are credited with the marvelous sets — hovers oppressively in the background of Act One, looking ready to revolt. (It's a ingenious mix of mannequins and actors, brilliantly fooling the eye.)
At the after-party over at Tavern on the Green, brightly baubled up for the holidays,
Crowley let me in on his serf secret: "They're all from Juilliard," he says drily. "They are 200 kids from Juilliard. They have to be very, very still, or they get fired. If they move a muscle, out!"
O'Brien also reminds you that you've just seen a saga, capping his show with a heart-soaring curtain call where the cast flows out in wave after happy wave. "As they said in The Heiress: 'I was taught by masters,'" he quipped, crediting the source. "Ellis Rabb staged some of the best curtain calls I ever saw. I was his assistant for nine years."
Brian F. O'Byrne, who plays the radical theorist and editor Alexander Herzen, reads a
lot into that very big bow: "You know what? It's a testament to the commitment that
everybody has. Nobody stages a curtain call better than Jack, first of all — I mean, he
deserves a Lifetime Achievement Tony just for his curtain calls — but also it's his nod to
'This is a company, and this whole thing cannot work unless a company gets together and
stays together and knows it's a bigger picture.' I think that this curtain call is like 'It will revolve, it will change, the people will change in each show, and here are more actors.'"
Josh Hamilton giddily agrees with O'Byrne about the abundance of riches to be found
with so many players. "It's overwhelming, actually, this cast — so many amazing people,"
he says. "You want to connect with everyone, but it's exhausting. You can't. I like them so much, but it's hard to have deep, meaningful conversations with 42 people a night."
Herzen and the character Hamilton plays, Nicholas Ogarev, become more important
figures as the trilogy progresses, but in the beginning chapter they enter the action
through the back door. "Nicholas was a poet and a socialist who came from money," explains Hamilton. "He had serfs, and he actually gave his estate back to the serfs. He really walked the walk, y'know. He practiced what he preached. I have a few witty lines in the second play when everyone else goes to Paris. Most of my stuff's in the third play."
O'Byrne looks at his role beyond the boundaries of this Voyage. "We're not just working one play, which is odd," he notes. "We start teching Wednesday for the second play so
It's odd for me, certainly, to think of this one play. Most of my work is like an iceberg.
It's still underneath right now. In the next two shows, it will hopefully reveal itself.
"Herzen becomes the centerpiece in Parts Two and Three because all the characters
literally revolve around where he resides in Paris and in Italy and, most particularly in
London. His house became a place where all the exiles — the political refugees — came and
congregated and tried to spread a revolution all across Europe. He's kinda the smartest
guy in the bunch as well, and he had a profound effect on Russian history."
Tracking a dozen name actors through the floral halls of Tavern of the Green felt like the running of the bulls at Pamplona — in this case, pre-Bolsheviks and so many of them, not
easily contained in the traditional press room at the start of Tavern's winding corridor. In the role of the aristocratically born anarchist, Michael Bakunin, Ethan Hawke was the
firebrand who burned longest and hottest in the opening Voyage, and he had no problem itemizing why he took the part: "A: I love Tom Stoppard's writing. B: I'd do anything to be in a rehearsal room with Jack O'Brien because it's a pleasure. And C: Certainly I look for challenging parts. I've never been in a Tom Stoppard play. I've never done this kind of work. I don't know that much about Russian history. It was exhilarating to work on it. And, also, I have to say the part was an easy fit. Every now and then, you stumble on a
part that you're really right for. It was not a lot of work for me. I enjoyed it immensely."
Unlike some of his fellow cast members, Hawke stays with the character he was dealt for
all three plays. "One of the things that make it so much fun is working on the third.
Seeing where the character goes informs how you play the first. Very rarely do you play a
character in the second play and you know his whole childhood and his background because you've played it. It's fascinating and rich. It's like acting in 'Anna Karenina.'"
Billy Crudup, as the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, also commanded a sizable portion of the evening's focus and drew big laughs and applause for some key Stoppard rants. Crudup was euphoric at the party: "To get to be somebody who creates such beautiful, coherent and remarkable thought — spontaneously — is a very exciting endeavor for an actor
because you get to coin the most beautiful phrases, and Tom's written them exquisitely."
Tuberculosis, a major killer in the 19th century, takes its toll among the play's characters — a young philosopher named Nicholas Stankevich, among them, but, because the time covered (mid-1830s to mid-1840s), is rewound and replayed at a different
location for Act Two, he comes back with a worrisome cough. David Harbour, a
Tony-nominated Nick in Broadway's last Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, says he'll be
returning for other roles in the other installments; in Shipwreck, he's a revolutionary poet
who has an affair with O'Byrne's wife, Jennifer Ehle, and, in Salvage, he's a nihilist doctor who becomes a character in a novel written by Ivan Turgenev (Jason Butler
Harner).
Turgenev, best known in the theatre world as the playwright of Fortune's Fool
(earning a Tony nomination 119 years after his death, and prompting an eligibility rule
change) and A Month in the Country, is one of the major thinkers around whom the
trilogy revolves. "I'm the wealthiest and the youngest in the group," proffers Harner.
"Then, I get published, and I get very 'funny.' In the next play, I'm in love with an opera
singer you never meet so everyone talks about whether we've having sex or not.
"The second play is so beautiful. Jennifer and Brian are incredible in it. It's smaller in scope. It's still 10 years, but it's more about relationships, friends growing old together. They've all known each other about 10 or 15 years now so it's much more Chekhovian."
Martha Plimpton breaks into an easy rhapsody about work, with nary a hint of "The
Volga Boatman." Fact is, says she, "I'm having a ball." She plays Varenka Bakunin,
Hawke's sister, who winds up living with him and her child in Germany after she leaves
her husband. Natasha is the next character she has warming up in the bull pen, and she's
no less chaotic: "She ends up marrying Nicholas Ogarev, who's played by Josh Hamilton,
and then she falls in love with Brian's character, Alexander Herzen, and she's sorta living
with the two of them, and then having Ogarev's children, and Ogarev goes to live with a
whore in London, played by Kellie Overbey. It's all crazy. They're all crazy people,
Harry." This will carry her through Shipwreck and Salvage but no safe harbor in sight. Continued...
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