EYE FROM THE AISLE: “What shall we do with Russia?”—Tony
Winner at Shotgun Players
"Voyage"
by Tom Stoppard at Shotgun Players is a beautifully produced,
very dense play by arguably the greatest living playwright. It
is the first play in the trilogy “Coast of Utopia”
which won the Best Play Tony Award in 2007. This first segment
is a historical drama of Russia from 1833 to 1844—a time
of Revolution in Europe.
Its direction by Patrick
Dooley, is flawless and fluid down to the set changes. But for
the most part it plays like a typical “Three Sisters,”
with predictable Chekhov-like, “we must get to Moscow”
acting. You feel like you’re in Russia at a great rural
estate or in the streets of St. Petersburg, but one often needs
to make an effort to discern what’s happening. It also takes
concentration to sort out the characters and their relationships.
In the midst of this, there are a few extraordinary performances
that should be seen.
But hurry if you want to
see it, because it is selling out and closes its extended run
on April 29.
If you don’t remember
your Philosophy 101 or your post-Napoleonic history of Europe,
if you haven’t read Pushkin or Turgenev, if may mean less
to you than if you have—or it may spark an interest.
The play is about Russia’s
struggle for freedom--a topic that is still in the headlines today.
This is about their struggle a generation before Russia freed
the serfs and when the Motherland was under the thumb of the Czar’s
police state and his Censor. This struggle is for intellectual
freedom: Russia has never had a Renaissance like the rest of Europe,
free thought is as suppressed as it was in the Middle Ages and
the people have been treated as children by the ruling Romanovs.
The new rage is to study philosophy—Kant, Schelling, Hegel
and “German Idealism.” It is mainly the sons and daughters
of the land-holding gentry—their 1%ers—who are engaged
in the study and the struggle. In their struggle for a life of
the mind, they long for a national literature—which will
give rise to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, and Gorky,
later Pasternak, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn—and to date five
Nobel Laureates in Literature and the fourth largest book producing
nation
The cast of 21 actors are
all talented and give it their best, but it is a hard-to-act piece.
One performance stands above the rest: Nick Medina as V. Belinsky,
the impoverished, less-educated revolutionary and literary critic,
in the midst of aristocrats. Shy and awkward, ragged and a little
dumpy among these lithe patricians, when he is aroused his rhetoric
about the Revolution is entrancing and makes one want to rise
to the Marseillaise. Medina knows how to play Stoppard: he directed
Shotgun’s production of his “Travesties” a few
years ago.
Other cameos reveal how
this play might have won the Tony. When Matthew Lai, Richard Reinholdt,
and Patrick Jones are on stage our attention brightens. Mr. Lai
has the ability to inject comedy and realism into period acting,
Mr. Reinholdt is a large and charismatic actor who swept us up
in “The Norman Conquests” at Shotgun, and Mr. Jones
as Alexander Herzen has clear power as an actor we hope to see
more of perhaps in the other two installments of this trilogy
should Shotgun produce them in future seasons. "Voyage"
had productions in London, New York and Moscow, which starred
such recognizables as Stephan Dillane, Ethan Hawke, Billy Crudup,
and Martha Plimpton. Perhaps it takes actors of that caliber to
capture our attention and pull us in.
The production values are
reason enough to see it. There is the fascinating set design by
Nina Ball in which the wall panels are suspended from a palm-like
girder which the actors rearrange in a fascinating scene-change
display. Artistic director Patrick Dooley understands that the
scene change is an integral part of the show and takes no chances
that attention or energy might be lost in the changing. The servants
efficiently and methodically clear the table and store it just
as it would be done in a wealthy home which helps take our imagination
to the intended place. (The service of wine in crystal flutes
by the actors playing waiters is a flawless supporting performance
that truly does “take you there”.) The costumes by
Alexae Visel are exquisite and a heroic undertaking to seamlessly
outfit 21 players in lavish period apparel that doesn’t
look like stage costumes.
Tom Stoppard (born Tomas
Straussler) is a sort of G. B. Shaw for our time: ideas and language
are his topics. He has won two Oscars for screenwriting (“Brazil”
and “Shakespeare in Love”) and three other Tony Awards
for Best Play (“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,”
“Travesties,” “The Real Thing”). His writing
is witty and sometimes mind-bogglingly complex. There is seldom
sex and violence. He writes what I call “stay-awake”
plays—you must make the effort to intellectually participate.
He was born in the old Czechoslovakia, emigrated to Britain as
a child, and often writes about the struggle for freedom behind
any iron curtain.
