The show's other two parts will open in December and January, after which all three sections will play in repertory through March 11. Jack O'Brien is directing the production, which features a cast of more than 40 actors, including Billy Crudup, Jennifer Ehle, David Harbour, Jason Butler Harner, Josh Hamilton, Ethan Hawke, Amy Irving, Brían F. O'Byrne, and Martha Plimpton.

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 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, the aristocrat-turned-anarchist Michael Bakunin, and the poet Nicholas Ogarev. They 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.