PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: The Coast of Utopia: Salvage Juggernaut's End
By Harry Haun
20 Feb 2007
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From Top: Tom Stoppard; Amy Irving and Martha Plimpton; Jack O'Brien and David Harbour; David Pittu and Patricia Conolly; Richard Easton; Josh Hamilton and Kellie Overbey; Brνan F. O'Byrne and Heather Goldenhersh.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | The Coast of Utopia (the whole megillah) officially washed up on these shores Feb. 18 at a matinee, improbably enough, at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre and there
were firebrands at The FireBird (the ritzy Russkie eatery on Restaurant Row) stirring up lots of dust at dusk, celebrating the fact they had made it across the finish line en masse.
Sir Tom Stoppard's fact-based musing about five revolutionary free(dom)-thinkers from 19th century Russia is cerebral speculation, given spectacular splash 'n' dash by director Jack O'Brien and his design team and the human heartbeat of a committed cast of 44.
"Epic is the word that falls to mind," said O'Brien, opting to skip the false modesty after such an Herculean enterprise. "It has been unique in the sense that there has never been anything like it before and, I'm convinced, there'll never be anything like it that follows.
"Nobody but somebody like Tom would conceive of a mountain this big, and nobody but us would be silly enough to want to climb it. Oh, we had such a good time. There has
been such a sense of achievement and bonding and mutual respect and collaboration among the artists who quote-created-unquote this. There were three different lighting
designers, poets all of them [Brian MacDevitt lit the first part (Voyage), Kenneth Posner the second (Shipwreck) and Natasha Katz the third (Salvage), and the dazzlingly
abstract sets throughout represented the teamwork of Bob Crowley and Scott Pask.]
Given the operatic flourish of this production, it is probably not surprising that, in three
weeks, O'Brien will only have to walk across Lincoln Center plaza to stage his next trilogy: Puccini's Il Trittico for The Metropolitan Opera. But first a trip to Disneyland?
"No, but I'm actually going on a cruise to Costa Rica on The Windstar. I'm so excited
about it. I've got black glasses and a big hat and a bunch of books and my scores to
Trittico, and I'll just lie in the deckchair and hope they bring me soup occasionally."
Stoppard also knows where his next trilogy is coming from: from another medium from
film. He did a three-part adaptation of Philip Pullman's cult epic, "His Dark Materials."
The next Stoppard stage saga to reach New York will be his current London hit, Rock 'n'
Roll, which covers 1968-1990 from the double perspective of Prague (where a rock band
comes to stand for Communist resistance) and of Cambridge (where the verities of love
and death shape three generations of a Marxist philosopher's family). The play won the Critics' Circle Theatre Award as 2006's best, but Sunday during the FireBird reveling it lost the Olivier Award (as did Peter Morgan's also-Broadway-bound Frost/Nixon) to David Harrower's Blackbird, which flies to Manhattan Theatre Club's Stage II April 10.
"Rock 'n' Roll is coming over in November," promised the author, "and I hope it comes
over with as many of the cast as possible." [He's talking Rufus Sewell, who has already
told the press he plans to be on board, and Brian Cox, whose son Alan is currently
representing the family on Broadway in Translations at the Biltmore.] Stoppard said his
lead producers in London, Sonia Friedman and Bob Boyett, are bringing the show over.
As for the epic at hand, "It's quite a relief," admitted Stoppard, and his weary expression
seemed to second that motion. He has been a constant at the rehearsals and performances,
tinkering and reshaping the text from the London Coast, which dropped anchor at a full
nine hours. The American version has been whittled down from that. "They're the same plays, but they're different," said Sir Tom. "I added things. I took things away. It was to do with making things clearer. It was clearer here than it was in London. In London, there was no opportunity to go back and do this because we never had time for that."
Andre Bishop and Bernard Gersten, co-chieftains of Lincoln Center Theater which produced all three installments, were beaming like men who'd spent their bucks wisely and well. "It's virtually sold out," said Gersten. "We're going into an extension April 12."
And, added Bishop, "We've extended it through the middle of May, and we're hoping, hoping to go longer, but we haven't made any decisions on that yet. It's a wonderful play, and it's Jack O'Brien's triumph. He and his designers and his cast have y'know, it's beyond my being able to say how wonderful it is. This company has been in rehearsal
and in performance since the end of August, and they all have worked very hard on it. It's a shorter show now probably eight hours and 15 minutes than it was in London."
During that time frame, 35 years of history is sprawled across the stage, and Catherine
Zuber's costumes contribute importantly to the period and sweep of the proceedings. "I
did a lot of research and thinking about this journey from 1833 to 1868, showing the
passage of time," she noted. Fashions change, it seems, and not just Russian fashion
because the central characters are constantly on the move, around the world, in exile.
"They tend to be in society, be it French or Italian or British. The first play was more
Russian, but the second one was more French, and the third one more British and Swiss," she said.
Like O'Brien, Zuber is hanging a sharp right into opera Carmen in London and The Ring
Cycle in Washington before returning to her own backyard, the Beaumont, for the first
Broadway revival of South Pacific. She couldn't confirm or deny the reigning
scuttlebutt: "I dunno, I'm just a costume designer, but, personally, I hope it's with
Victoria Clark. (She and Clark won their Tony Awards for The Light in the Piazza.)
The artist among the political minds that are overheating in the three Coast plays and the
character best-known to a contemporary audience, via his plays A Month in the Country
and Fortune's Fool is the novelist Ivan Turgenev, played by Jason Butler Harner with
a progressively unruly do which, clarified the actor, was a compromise on the real
thing:. "Turgenev was a full head of gray hair by the time he was 30 so you get a bunch of
gray at the end. It's a little bit between Mr. Magoo and Diana Vreeland, I'm afraid."
Hirsute aside, Harner hooked up to the character emotionally. "He tries to see everything
from all sides of the equation he tries to remain objective and I really admire that about
him. I'm a little more active than I think he is. I'm not going to stay out of an argument.
That's what I liked about him very much. And I think he's a little bit like Tom Stoppard,
Actually esoteric like Tom. They are very much alike, I think, in how their brains work."
Another Stoppard connection Harner made on the Internet. "His son, Ed Stoppard, just opened on the West End to great reviews, playing Tom Wingfield, opposite Jessica Lange, in The Glass Menagerie." It's a role Harner did with great sensitivity and distinction, with Sally Field, for the Kennedy Center salute to Tennessee Williams, and
"I've been on the email a lot with Ed, blatantly telling him 'I found this,' 'I did that.'"
The whole Coast experience is without precedence in Harner's experience. "The closest
thing is grad school where you're in something so long. We've been rehearsing since Sept. 5, and Friday the 16th of February was our first day off. Really (other than, like, Christmas)." He spent it, he sheepishly admitted, "sleeping and watching dumb TV.
"Now, we get to just run the damn thing. I'm so happy about that. There are only four of
us Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, Brian O'Byrne and me who play the same role in all three plays so to get a chance to run all three together is the first chance for us to really see the spectrum of what we're trying to do with our characters. It's a great opportunity."
Hawke is keenly anticipating as well the marathon weekends when all three plays are performed back to back. "I think it's going to be really amazing," he predicted. "We're only going to do it about nine times. I think audience and company alike are going to feel
like something special happened. We the company are really looking forward to it."
He plays Michael Bakunin, the aristocrat-turned-anarchist, who starts out strong in the
first play and progressively loses ground to Alexander Herzen (O'Byrne), the radical
theorist and editor who eventually becomes the towering, unifying figure of the trilogy.
By the time the third play rolls in, a stint in Siberia has sapped Bakunin's rebellious
juices, reducing Hawke to some very creative character-acting. "Right now, the third play
is probably my favorite because it's the freshest. The paint is still wet from that one.
"We're all as good as our part. I've got a great part a really challenging part that asks
more of you than you can deliver and, that way, you get to reach the wall of your talent.
"You notice that. It's so much fun to do so complicated and rich and interesting and the
history of this is so thrilling. The opportunity to play somebody over 30 years of their life
gives you a chance to see a lot of their insides as human beings and into their world." Continued...
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