CRAZY IDEALISTS, OR THE MONSTER IN ITS CRIB

The Coast of Utopia: Voyage

By Tom Stoppard

Shotgun Players

The Ashby Stage in Berkeley, California

A review by Christopher Bernard

As the news release aptly puts it, “In a tremendous coup for the biggest little theatre company in town, Shotgun Players has secured the rights to Tom Stoppard’s impressive trilogy,” The Coast of Utopia, whose American premiere run in New York several years ago played to sold-out houses over several months, and whose London premiere before that was hardly less well-received.

Well, the first result of that coup de theatre is in, with the San Francisco Bay Area premiere of the first, and in many ways most moving, installment of Stoppard’s exploration of the closest thing to middle-class – excuse me, bourgeois – life in per-revolutionary Russia, where love vies with philosophy vies with politics, and neither philosophy nor love, nor even politics, is sure to win in the end.

One doesn’t need to be a craven philistine and historical know-nothing to wonder why on earth we should be interested in something apparently so remote from us as a bunch of young people prattling about German idealist philosophy (Kant! Schelling! Fichte! Hegel! The transcendental ideal! The Self! The unfolding of the Absolute!), in a remote province of a backward Russia where wealth is measured in how many serfs you own (“… in the matter of the ownership of human beings we were years ahead of America…”), in the distant 1830s?

But as the trilogy progresses (Shotgun Players will produced the second and third parts, Shipwreck and Salvage, over the next two years, then perform the complete trilogy in repertory ), it will become clear that what we are witnessing is not just the romantic confusions and antics of a group of idea-drunk idealists, as touching and comic as those can be: we are seeing the flaring of a match that will light a fuse which three generations later will explode in one of the world’s most overwhelming political catastrophes, the Bolshevik revolution, which, for some good and an enormous amount of ill, defined the world politics of the 20^th century and set the stage, and even created the political methods, from concentration camps to anarchism to police terrorism, for the 21^st. We are seeing the monster in its crib.

Patrick Dooley directs a briskly paced (except in one or two places where the script sabotages him) performance of the opening play, Voyage, which introduces us to some of the personalities, in their larval stage, as youthful ephebes, who helped define the equally callow political possibilities faced by Russia in the ever-narrowing interstices of the Tsar’s autocracy, as those personalities burned their way through the fashionable thought of their time.

We meet the glib, narcissistic Mikhail Bakunin before he discovered the “beauty of destruction” and became the prince of anarchism, and we meet the man who was in many ways more his opposite than his future rival and enemy for leadership of the left, Karl Marx: the warm-hearted yet level-headed Alexander Herzen, who is already trying to hold the thankless balance between extremes in a political philosophy that would eventually be called liberalism.

We get to know the impoverished literary critic Vissasion Belinsky touting literature (Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky to come) as a way for Russia to salvation, and we’re introduced to the literary gesture itself personified in a young, still drifting Ivan Turgenev, who is yet to discover his true calling as novelist and aesthete.

The play is immensely stimulating, and unexpectedly moving, as the characters, the women especially, are tossed about between the winds of passion and the hot air of their beaux, and all of them are eventually waylaid by despotism’s paranoid and nature’s indifferent dooms (cat’s paws of the Ginger Cat, an emblem of fate’s callousness, that makes its enigmatic appearance in a costume party late in the last act), but it requires a little background to enjoy. Shotgun greatly helps with an informative and entertaining talk given half an hour before each showtime by Joanie McBrien, who serves as dramaturg for the production. This is not to be missed.

The production is favored by the usual, engaging performances for which Shotgun is known, but three demand special notice: Yahya Adbul-Mateen II in the too-brief role of Ivan Turgenev (Turgenev appears more frequently in the following parts of the trilogy, which are slated for production over the next two years, where we may, with luck, see more of Mr. Abdul-Mateen), John Mercer, who is enormously sympathetic as Mikhail Bakunin’s liberal-and-paying-for-it father (who was it that said “the despot breeds a liberal breeds an anarchist breeds a despot”?) , and, above all, Nick Medina’s brilliantly realized Belinsky in all his bumbling earnestness and infuriating lucidity. (It’s curious how Medina is costumed, with wire-rimmed spectacles, to look a bit like a cross between Pierre Bezukhov as described by Tolstoy in War and Peace and a russified Franz Schubert, whose music appears throughout the second act: perhaps serendipitously, but with a touching aptness.)

The elegantly resourceful sets are by designed by Nina Ball, the handsome costumes by Alexae Visel.

The next installment of the trilogy will be staged next season, when the monster – of revolution, of fate? – will lick its whiskers and stretch its paws.

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Christopher Bernard is the author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins and founder and co-editor of Caveat Lector magazine (www.caveat-lector.org).