Tom Stoppard is my favorite contemporary playwright (I played the lead in his Travesties in Los Angeles). His new three-play saga, The Coast of Utopia, about intellectuals in Russia (and Paris) set in the 1840s, is now running at Lincoln Center.
Play #1, Voyage has a magical, gorgeous opening, with a brilliant, breathtaking design throughout the plays by Bob Crowley and Scott Pask and great lighting by Brian MacDevitt. Then we get a Chekhovian confusion of a large family in the country and its romances and arguments. There are clever phrases and simple, 19th Century philosophic explorations of consciousness. The scenes are short, and the action flows, with ghastly, ghostly figures of peasants in the background and as servants.
There are arguments that are interesting and tedious at the same time because I've heard the arguments before, and I'm more interested in the relationships, which seem to be secondary. Lots of arm-waving tirades and histrionics obscure the arguments, and the audience chuckles at the histrionics, so performance overwhelms ideas, especially with Billy Crudup as a literary critic. Still Stoppard's wit can't help but come through, even in some of the bloated discourses.
Ethan Hawke is fine as the young rebel, and Jennifer Ehle captures me completely.
Act Two shows us Moscow during the same time period, and at the end of the almost three-hour play, the action will move to Paris.
