Stoppard’s New Math: 41 Actors, Half a Year, 3 Plays

“THE COAST Of UTOPIA,” Tom Stoppard’s sweeping three-part epic that will be populating Lincoln Center for the next six months, contains, among other things: 35 years of 19th-century Russian intellectual history; more than 70 roles; discussions of Hegel, Schelling, Pushkin and Kant; adulterous affairs, both secret and permitted; the revolution of 1848; scenes in Moscow, Paris, Nice, London, under a large chandelier, at a picnic, beside an ice skating rink. It examines the lives, public and domestic, of five forefathers of the Russian Revolution: Alexander Herzen, a writer and pioneering socialist; Mikhail Bakunin, an aristocrat turned anarchist; Ivan Turgenev, a poet and novelist; Nicholas Ogarev, a poet and close friend of Herzen’s; and Vissarion Belinsky, a brilliant literary critic. It also includes their lovers, families, colleagues, antagonists, hangers-on and one ominous, cigar-smoking cat.
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