'The Coast of Utopia: Voyage' review: bold launch
It
takes a while for "Voyage," the first part of Tom Stoppard's
"The Coast of Utopia" trilogy, to set sail in the Shotgun
Players' West Coast premiere that opened Friday. But the revolution
wasn't built in a day. By the time you've sorted out a Russian
novel's worth of characters and become invested in some of them,
it may feel as if the trip is ending too soon.
That's an unusual thing
to say about a 2 1/2-hour drama, but it's a testament to the ambitions
of Shotgun's 21st season opener. "Voyage" isn't just
a large-cast (21), time-sprawling (11 years) epic. It's the first
stage in Shotgun's three-year trip through the trilogy - the 2002
London and '06 Broadway sensation - culminating in 2014 with marathon
stagings of all three plays.
That can make much of "Voyage"
seem like a complex intro to Stoppard's heady, evocative tour
of the earliest seeds of the Russian Revolution. The trilogy covers
the years 1833-66, and, though "Voyage" ends in '44,
two of the principal characters - Alexander Herzen, the father
of socialism, and literary giant Ivan Turgenev - don't show up
until late in the game. "Voyage" focuses on Michael
Bakunin, well before he became the fiery prophet of anarchism.
But even if it can be confusing
at times, frustrating at others - we have to wait a year to see
what happens next? - and seems diminished on Shotgun's Ashby Stage,
it's a voyage worth taking. As it progresses, the play more than
sets the context for what's to come. It draws us into a world
of feudal comfort, suffering serfs and intellectual ferment chafing
under heavy-handed, paranoid censorship and the tsar's secret
police.
And love. The first act
takes place on the rural Bakunin estate, where the patriarch (an
amiably pompous John Mercer), who prides himself on his liberalism,
and his watchful wife (a sharp Zehra Berkman) worry over the marital
prospects of their four daughters. With good reason. Their pampered
son Michael (Joseph Salazar) is not only blowing off his military
career but making his sisters dissatisfied with their suitors.
Meanwhile, Salazar's whirlwind
of a self-obsessed young Bakunin, basking in his sisters' adulation,
is more excited about his great ideas - which progress from Shelley
through Hegel in spurts of epiphanies. The second act transfers
the intense battles of ideas to Moscow, backtracking through the
same years.
At times, director Patrick
Dooley and his cast - including Salazar and Nick Medina as the
fervent, awkward revolutionary literary critic Belinsky - are
better at expressing the passion of the philosophical apostles
than their ideas. Patrick Jones' solid, intense and articulate
young Herzen and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's casually bright, romantic
Turgenev add considerable depth and immediacy to the intellectual
drama. So does a smitten Caitlyn Louchard in the way she hangs
on the young men's words.
Anne Hallinan, Britney Frazier
and Alex Shafer capably represent the world of serfs and dispossessed,
though Dooley's stagings still seem underpopulated, cramped and
less varied than desirable. The metal frame for Nina Ball's spare
settings looks designed for more scene changes than we see. But
this is the beginning of a long journey. Shotgun has a reputation
for shows that improve considerably during their runs. This "Voyage"
has only just begun.
