Lincoln Center Sets Dates for Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia

During the final three and one-half weeks of the production’s run, audiences will have the opportunity to see all three parts of the trilogy in successive performances. In addition, on three Saturdays — February 24, March 3, and March 10 — theatergoers will be able to see all three parts in one-day marathons beginning at 11am.

The show will be performed by a company of more than 30 actors playing more than 70 roles, with casting yet to be announced. Tony Award winner Jack O’Brien, who helmed LCT’s recent production of Henry IV, will direct. The production will have sets by Bob Crowley and Scott Pask, costumes by Catherine Zuber, lighting by Natasha Katz, Brian MacDevitt, and Kenneth Posner, and original music and sound design by Mark Bennett.

Beginning in mid-19th century Russia during the repressive reign of Tsar Nicholas I, the action of the play spans a period of 30 years. 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.

Voyage, which is set in the Russian countryside as well as in Moscow and St. Petersburg, will open officially on November 5. The second part of the trilogy, Shipwreck, begins 13 years later outside Moscow and follows the characters’ exile to Paris, Dresden, and Nice. It will begin previews on December 5 and will open officially on December 21. Salvage, which takes place over a period of 12 years in London and Geneva, will begin previews on January 30 and will open officially on February 15.

Stoppard has won three Tony Awards for Best Play, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, and The Real Thing. He received Tony nominations for The Invention of Love and Arcadia, both of which were produced by Lincoln Center Theater, and he was most recently represented on Broadway in 2004 with the revival of Jumpers.