The Coast of Utopia Part One – Voyage

Lincoln Center Theater presents Tom Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia, a three part epic performed by a company of over 30 actors playing over 70 roles. Jack O’Brien directs.

Beginning in mid-19th century Russia during the repressive reign of Tsar Nicholas I, Tom Stoppard’s sweeping epic spans a period of thirty years as it tells the panoramic story of a group of Russian intellectuals, headed by the radical theorist and editor Alexander Herzen, the novelist Ivan Turgenev, the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky and the aristocrat-turned-anarchist Michael Bakunin, who lead a band of like-minded countrymen in a revolutionary movement in which they strive to change and fix a political system by using their minds as their only weapon.

The action begins in 1833 with Part One – Voyage, set in the Russian countryside as well as in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Part Two – Shipwreck, begins thirteen years later outside Moscow and follows the characters’ exile to Paris, Dresden and Nice. Part Three – Salvage, takes place over a period of twelve years in London and Geneva.

Lincoln Center Theater mounts the three parts of the trilogy individually, rehearsing and performing each part in turn as the next opens. During the final three and one-half weeks of the production’s run audiences have the opportunity to see all three parts in succession. And on three Saturdays — February 24, March 3 and March 10 – theatergoers will be able to see all three – Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage – in one-day marathons beginning at 11am.