By Harry Haun
20 Feb 2007

The "journey," as they say in actors' jargon, left O'Byrne somewhere between exhausted and exhilarated. "It feels tiring," he confessed. "We had Friday afternoon off. It was the third afternoon we've had off in 175 days." [And what did he do on his day off? "F---ing laundry, that's what I did!"] "For my character, it's the first time I've done a run-through. Now we have the full play, and we've just kinda discovering Part Three. I've never had a run-through before so right now all I can see is the places that need some more work.

"When we start doing them all together, I think it's going to have an energy and a poignancy that has been impossible to achieve when we were just putting them on individually. The rhythm has been stopped each time. We didn't know the rhythm, and now — this coming Saturday — will be the time where we're going to discover the effect."

In the first play, Herzen amounted to a two-scene cameo. Then sex entered the big picture. He was the cuckolded in Part Two and the cuckolder in Part Three, a widower who makes a mistress of the wife (Martha Plimpton) of his childhood friend, Nicholas Ogarev, the affably alcoholic, tragically epileptic poet (Hamilton). The entire affair is carried off, by all hands, with considerable Noel Cowardian sophistication and elan.

"There's an old joke where a guy comes home and finds his wife in bed with his best friend," proffered Hamilton. "He pulls out a gun and shoots the wife, and, when the police say, 'Why did you shoot your wife?,' the guy answers, ‘Well, he was my best friend.'"

The cuckolding, he contended, "is a very interesting insight into the character that I play. These characters were really trying to live by their belief and their ideals. They believed in freedom the same way that open societies and communes in the '60s did — sorta 'Hey, man, that's cool. We can all share each other.' But, of course, it's never that easy. It gets much more complicated, but I think that my character really tried to live true to that. He didn't feel that he owned his wife. He felt she was free to do what she wanted. He just wanted everyone to love each other, and he actually ends up, I think, with what becomes the healthiest relationship in the play — with Mary Sutherland (Kellie Overbey)."

Epilepsy strikes the character twice during Play Three, and Hamilton was ready for it. "Originally, I searched the Internet for videos, then I met two women from the epileptic foundation here. One of the interesting things that they taught us is that you should never put something in the person's mouth. They can hurt you. They can bite down and hurt their teeth. No one ever, actually, swallows their tongue, so you should never do that."

It's a frighteningly accurate depiction of a seizure, but Hamilton's tendency is to pooh-pooh it: "Basically, it's how I dance anyway, so it wasn't that far-fetched for me."

As Natasha Tuchkov Orarev, the object of this amorous in-house tug-of-war, Martha Plimpton brings to flinty fruition a role she only introduced in Part II — then as the best friend of Herzen's wife (Jennifer Ehle) and here as the woman who would be Herzen's wife (were she not already married to his best friend). "It's odd how ahead of their times they were," Plimpton said, marveling at the envelop-pushing progressiveness of it all, "very surprising but, apparently, very historically accurate and very much a part of the philosophical period, which I didn't know. I hadn't realized it until we started researching.

"I do love this character. She's very different, obviously, from anyone I've ever played. She's very complex, and there's a lot that you don't see on stage. I love that — when there's a life to the character that's off-stage. It allows you to surprise people a little bit."

The prospect of parading the character in all her neuroses in one day — plus her Varenka Bakunin in Play One, another man-divided damsel — has Plimpton champing at the bit:

"I'm thrilled to do it all in one day. I think that's really when we're going to have a sense of what these plays are all about, actually. Up till now, we've given each one its specific time and its due. And now, once we really start performing all in a big arc in one day, I think we will be overwhelmed with the sense of exactly who these people are."

AWOL at the party was Billy Crudup, who plays the forgotten fifth musketeer, Vissarion Belinsky, the literary critic claimed by tuberculosis exactly midway through the Marathon — so, presumably, Crudup saw no reason to rise from the grave and attend.

Amy Irving has no role in Salvage either, but she showed up to celebrate anyway, perhaps coasting a bit on the pristine, sensual cameo she contributes to Part Two: Ogarev's estranged first wife, Maria (did he marry no other kind?). "I have a very good time swinging my purse," she declared simply, "and it's nice to have the contrasting roles — to go from Mom to a sexual being." (She draws matriarchal duties in the first play as Varvara Bakunin, playing mother to Ehle, Plimpton, Overbey and Hawke.) Irving doesn't subscribe to the theory that high-minded thinkers in any epoch would be above base sexual matters. "God, no. I think the deeper you think, the more sex you gotta have."

She, too, has never had an acting experience like this one. "Who has? Except for the cast in London, who's ever been in something like this? Maybe Nicholas Nickleby — no! This has been a unique experience — working on different plays at the same time. Nothing has come along like this before. It has been an incredible lesson for all of us, and I think we've all learned so much. I mean, this world of the Russian intelligentsia and the modern stories of love that come out of that world — it's just been incredible. And to have Tom Stoppard there with us every step of way, spoon feeding us. No, nothing approaches this."

Her patriarchal counterpart in the first play, Richard Easton, moves on to two other richly colored-up cameos in the other plays — an officious Russian consul general in Nice in the second play, and dying Polish royalty in the third — but, shrugged Easton, a vet of rep, that's the nature of the beast. "All the kids who haven't done rep, of course — it will be wonderful for them," he predicted. "They have no idea the buzz you get when you suddenly come back to the first play after two days of doing the other two plays."

David Christopher Wells, a swing serf-servant-revolutionary who rises in the ranks to the role of Perotkin the spy in Part Three, has a reason to enjoy the marathon days beyond just the playing of the thing: overtime. "We get a bump up in salary, but I forget how much it is," he said. "We do our first one on Saturday, and I'm excited. This opening was a really wonderful experience for us. For the first time, we had an audience that had seen all three in succession in two days. People had seen One and Two yesterday and Three today. You could tell a lot of people did that. For the marathon, traveling the whole trilogy with the same audience is going to be a great experience. I can't wait. They're hearing things they didn't know as there, hearing things in Part Three that were set up in Part One, and an audience who saw One back in November may miss the connection."

All parts are now in place, ready to start twirling in repertory. Let the games begin.

Ethan Hawke, Brํan F. O'Byrne, Josh Hamilton and Jason Butler Harner at the Salvage opening night party.
photo by Aubrey Reuben

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