By Harry Haun
22 Dec 2006

The triumph of Tom Stoppard's sprawling cerebral trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, is that it takes the revolutionary free-thinkers of 19th century Russian life off their lofty perches of importance and brings them down to earth, makes them accessible, human-size — ready for their Chekhovian close-ups.

So it was perhaps a little jest of God that when the curtain rose Dec. 21 at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont on the second installment, Shipwreck, that Alexander Herzen, the radical theorist and editor, stubbornly refused to budge.

Each of the three plays, which covers in three hours a crucial decade that contributed to the Bolshevik Revolution, starts with Herzen sitting midstage in midair in a chair slowly revolving, lost in torturous thought, slapping in his hand the glove of his drowned son, while great gray waves of change churn turbulently under, above and around him. On this particular evening — for the first and only time in any of the Utopia productions here, in London or in Russia — there was a hydraulic lift glitch, and Herzen remained resolutely in place, spinning in thought, slapping in the wind, while vast waves of black silk receded over the heads of extras carrying trees and into the wings.

The audience was about to applaud this remarkable-but-what-does-it-all-mean? effect when the curtain came down, and an announcement was made that the production would start over shortly because of a technical malfunction. "Shortly" turned into close to 15 minutes, but, when the audience saw Herzen disappear through a hole in the floor while a tsunami of change and revolutionary thought swept across the stage, they applauded heartily. There were far harder stunts ahead — including a fizzle of a French revolution — executed without a hitch and with a grand operatic flair by Jack O'Brien.

Director O'Brien, a fussy perfectionist, was mercifully spared this spectacle. "I was in the office working on the third part so I didn't see any of it," he was oh-so-happy-to-report at the after-party held across the courtyard in the Grand Promenade second floor of Avery Fisher Hall. "Thank God, I didn't see that! I would have gone into cardiac arrest.

"But you can't get too worried about it if you didn't see it. That's why I don't sit at the theatre on opening nights. The nights the critics are there, and the opening nights — I just can't do it because I see it through other people's eyes, and I just don't want to do that.

"When they stopped, my assistants came into the room where I was working, and Stoppard came in. And they said, 'Don't worry, they're starting again.' And I said, 'What!' And Tom said, 'Can I stay in here with you?'" Eventually, after the show got back on track and started making a lively run of it, the author returned to the audience.

"The theatre people loved it," the director finally deduced from his impromptu post-show poll. "I don't know what anybody else thought of it, but all the theatre crowd loved it."

Scott Pask, who's half-responsible for the magnificent look of the show, was the senior set designer on duty (his other half, Bob Crowley, was presumably at the drawing boards sketching up Part Three), and Pask admitted that it's a pretty queasy thing to go through.

"It's so out of your hands," he sighed. "That opening moment is so spectacular you gotta get it right. It was disappointing, but then it happened, and we got on with it, and we were able to do it perfectly as a vision, and I was happy. That's the beauty of live theatre!"

Pask and Crowley's major achievement of the evening was the creation of Paris via the Place de la Concorde (which, on stage, runs from six inches to 12 feet and is flanked by the horses of Marly that shatter in the heat of insurrection, as per O'Brien's instructions).

"Of course, it's Jack," admitted Pask. "So much of it's Jack. We're sitting there, like, 'How can we do the revolution and create Paris in an elegant way and then destroy it?' So I decided I wanted to make it look like white porcelain and then it breaks apart and strew it with red silk. I thought that was the way to do it: make something incredibly beautiful, then have it fall apart. The pieces actually match the furniture so it's this rubble of totally white furniture from the apartment and a sculpture that was bombed into the ground."

Brian F. O'Byrne, the actor playing Herzen who was left high and dry and in spin cycle for a short eternity at the top of the play, said his favorite moment of the evening was when his malfunctioning pedestal "finally sank into the ground. I won't give any trade secrets, but it was inelegant how I got off that thing behind the curtain." Insult to injury.

Shipwreck is the play that brings Herzen forth as the focal character of the trilogy. In part one — after his introductory opening whirl before the play begins — he meanders into the play midway through, exhibits some charismatic tendencies and holds his own with twentysomethings talking rebellion. He's the play's rallying-point, with homes in Russia, France and England where leading intellectual malcontents of the day congregate and roil.

He has for houseguests four name-brand firebrands whom Stoppard found in Isaiah Berlin's "Russian Thinkers." (Collectively, the five inspired the invention of the word "intelligentsia" for "the intellectual opposition considered as a social force"): Ethan Hawke plays Michael Bakunin, an aristocratic anarchist; Billy Crudup is Vissarion Belinsky, a literary critic; Josh Hamilton is Nicholas Ogarev, a womanizing poet, and Jason Butler Harner completes the quintet as Ivan Turgenev, a novelist-playwright.

O'Byrne is one who see the glass as two-thirds full. "It doesn't feel like anything right now," he admitted, "and probably won't until we do the third one." But his admiration for the man he is playing continues to grow, he said. Herzen and his marriage to Natalie (Jennifer Ehle) received some devastating, finally fatal body-blows during this Paris stop, and, although he loses profoundly, Stoppard gives him speeches of great strength and coping ability. "You know what?" he said. "They're even better ones in the third play when he's washed up on the shore with all the other exiles from Europe in London." Continued...

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