The Coast of Utopia: Voyage

I feel like I just started some important project last night but really I just saw a play. Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia" is a trilogy, and I just saw the first part "Voyage." It's about a circle of Russian intellectuals in the nineteenth centur: Michael Bakunin, Nicholas Stankevich, Vissarion Belinsky, Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Ogarev. In last night's show they were all young and stupid--especially Michael Bakunin. Ethan Hawke did a great job playing somebody who was charismastic and idealistic and thinks the universe revolves around him. Billy Crudup was also great as Belinsky.

On the way out I pushed through what I swear I thought was a group of college students standing around near the entrance and then realized it was the cast I just saw. Billy Crudup is a tiny, tiny man.

There were times when the play actually reminded me of lj, I guess because it's one modern place where people sometimes get very intense about ideas. There's one scene where someone is considering printing a new essay in a newspaper and he's discussing getting it past the censors. He says, "I think we can do it if we change a couple of words. Two, in fact. "Russia" and "we." He suggests changing it to "certain people," like "Certain people are neither east nor west..." "The Rennaissance passed certain people by..." It reminded me of those lj posts where people try to respond to a post without referencing the actual post because that might be wanky.

So two more plays to go...