Stage Review Lincoln Center Staging of Utopia Is Spectacular
This week I had a chance to revisit the most spectacular theater experience I've ever had. It took place on a weekend in February 2007. Over the form of two days, I experienced all nine hours of The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard's trilogy on 19th century Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries. My New York friend Patricia and I hung around the new Fourth dimension Warner Centre at Columbus Circle and visited neighborhood cafes in betwixt going to the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Middle for many glorious hours of theater. This week Lincoln Center Theaters historic that monumental theatrical achievement.
I flew to New York afterward work on Friday and met Patricia for an early lunch on Saturday, saw Voyage, part one, then had an early dinner and saw Shipwreck, part two. On Lord's day, we saw a matinee of Salve, part 3. Nosotros had a concluding dinner, at which nosotros both were almost too exhausted to talk. I had bought copies of the scripts and read Voyage on the way home on Monday morning. I saved the playbill on my bookshelf along with the three volumes of scripts.
The trilogy was too washed as a marathon on a few Saturdays when you could come across all iii plays in ane twenty-four hour period, from 11am to 11pm.
I've never forgotten that weekend and like most memorable theater experiences, the visuals are imprinted in my brain, to exist released when some tangential retention nudges them. That's what happened this week.
Lincoln Center Theaters historic the 14th anniversary of The Coast of Utopia's U.Southward. premiere in November 2006 with a virtual discussion that was open to theater fans. Managing director Jack O'Brien, 4 bandage members—and—in person from London—the playwright himself. I was on a Zoom telephone call with Tom Stoppard! No, he didn't know I was there—simply the participants were on the Zoom screen. Only information technology was an exhilarating moment.
The play has more than 70 characters, performed past 40 actors in the New York production. The cast size and complexity of the story explain why this magnificent historical work has been produced and then few times: in London in 2002, in New York in 2006-07, Moscow in 2007 and Tokyo in 2009. (This article describes the daunting nature of the production.)
Breathtaking pattern for the trilogy was by Bob Crowley and Scott Pask with costumes by Catherine Zuber. The gorgeous musical score, which flowed like a film score, was by Michael Bennett.
The actors participating in the discussion were Jennifer Ehle and Martha Plimpton, who played Liubov and Varenka Bakunin, two sisters, in Voyage; Ethan Hawke, equally their brother Michael Bakunin, a writer and educatee of philosophy; and Billy Crudup, who played Vissarion Belinsky, a noted literary critic and radical.
The actors discussed the product experience, which involved well-nigh a twelvemonth'south commitment, starting with nine months of rehearsal. (Role 3 was being rehearsed while parts 1 and 2 were on stage. The typical rehearsal time for a modern play is four to six weeks). Cast members prepared by studying Russian history and literature and four of the actors (including Plimpton) made a trip to Russian federation. "We did endless research…. We had books, piles of books, and notebooks where we noted reactions and questions," one of the actors commented.
Before seeing The Declension of Utopia, I had been preparing besides by reading Russian history and cultural history (Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Pushkin and Karl Marx are amidst the characters in Utopia). Many of the characters, including Belinsky and Alexander Herzen, are drawn from history. The play'south championship comes from a chapter in Avrahm Yarmolinsky'southward book,Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism (1959), which is on my to-be-read list.
The bandage compared the production—especially the occasional Saturday marathon performances—like going to campsite. Meals were brought in and there were dressing rooms available for naps, Plimpton said. The intense rehearsal and performance schedule meant they spent virtually all of their waking hours together at Lincoln Centre Theaters for a year.
One feel they all vividly remembered was when player Richard Easton, who played Alexander Bakunin, the father of the Bakunin siblings, "died on stage" for seven minutes. Information technology wasn't part of the script, but the audience didn't realize that at first. During a preview performance, Easton spoke a final line (it was "That is my last word" afterwards an argument with Michael) and started to exit, only to crumple in a heap at side stage. He had a heart assault. When Hawke realized that the fall was serious, he asked the audition the archetype question, "Is there a md in the firm?" But a stagehand performed CPR. Easton was revived in the ambulance and underwent a process to fix a centre arrhythmia. The opening date was briefly delayed because Easton's graphic symbol was a pivotal part of Voyage.
Hawke remembered that Easton asked him to come to his hospital room to run lines. After that, Hawke said, "we were all in service to something larger than ourselves."
The play begins in a Chekhovian mood; Voyage is set at Premukhino, the Bakunin country estate 150 miles northwest of Moscow. The sisters and blood brother Michael all long to escape to the city. At 1 indicate, in the middle of Voyage, Michael, who is in Berlin studying philosophy and translating a history, is asked to come back to the estate because Alexander wants him to study "agronomics," for which he has no fondness.
The storyline concerns philosophical and literary debates in pre-revolutionary Russia (and in Berlin and Paris) between 1833 and 1866. The actual Russian revolution, of class, was another one-half century in the time to come, but that didn't hinder discussions near liberty and censorship. Shipwreck takes place in Russia, then in Frg and France; and Salvage is set amongst the intellectual and revolutionary community in Paris.
The most important character among the radical intellectuals is Alexander Herzen, who Stoppard defines equally a "would-be revolutionary," just is an important historical figure. One of the most moving scenes in Shipwreck is about an bodily shipwreck on which Herzen's young son, Kolya, was lost. His wife Natalie is eagerly awaiting the inflow of her mother in law who has taken her grandson Kolya on a trip to Paris. The scene where Herzen has to tell Natalie that Kolya is non returning, is devastating.
Stoppard was asked what inspired him to write on the discipline of the Russian intellectuals and radicals. He said he was moved past the status of the critic Belinsky in Paris, "where yous could write anything you wanted and no one cared" whereas in Russia, "one could simply read work like this at midnight."
Stoppard was also asked when he knew he was writing 3 plays. It happened when I was writing the first, he said. And commenting on his ain feel working with the Lincoln Centre Theaters team, that 9 months "was the most binding and bonding theater I've always done."
An audience member asked Stoppard whether we can learn anything for today from his piece of work on radicals and revolutionaries. He responded that the strongest ideas in The Declension of Utopia are nearly families. His latest play, Leopoldstadt, besides focuses on the emotional and intellectual lives of a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna who get through wrenching political change in the outset one-half of the 20th century. The family unit had escaped the pogroms in the Eastward but the fates of the generations are impacted by communism and fascism over the years.
I recently read the script of Leopoldstadt (I had to draw a family tree nautical chart to proceed runway of the family branches). So far it has been produced only in London in January 2020. Had it not been for the coronavirus, information technology nearly likely would be on stage in New York past now and scheduled for Chicago in a coming season. It is a profound and moving play with almost 40 characters over distinct time periods from December 1899 to 1955. I look forward to seeing Leopoldstadtperformed on stage, perhaps in 2022.
Nearly the end of the discussion, director O'Brien summed up our mutual yearning for an end to our life of physical distancing. "Here's what the theater does. Y'all take to be there…. You're in a room of people who are giving their heart and soul to you. Nosotros have survived pandemics since Aeschylus and we'll survive this."
Update: You lot tin can at present watch The Coast of Utopia discussion on YouTube, but just through January 10.
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Source: https://thirdcoastreview.com/2020/12/21/essay-revisiting-stoppards-magnificent-the-coast-of-utopia-on-its-14th-anniversary/
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