You know one can't cram all of 19th century Russia into three overly-long Broadway plays, don't you, kiddies?

Heck, even Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, et cetera couldn't do it in all their writing combined.

Of course, that won't stop Tom Stoppard from giving it a whirl.

Bloomberg.com: Stoppard's `Voyage' Launches Russian Tour de Force
Reviewed by John Simon

``The Coast of Utopia'' is Tom Stoppard's trilogy about the 19th-century forefathers of the Russian Revolution.

Part One, ``Voyage,'' has just opened at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, with the others to follow, each a few weeks apart.
Supposedly independent entities, they strike me as three acts of one enormously long play. Gluttons for pleasure (or punishment, depending on your point of view) will have the option of taking in the whole at one daylong marathon toward the end of the run.

Stoppard doesn't like things simple. At the center of ``Utopia,'' insofar as there is one, is the wealthy land- and serf-owning Bakunin family: parents Alexander and Varvara, self- satisfied bourgeois; son Michael, a feckless but charismatic artillery officer; and four quite different daughters in their late teens or early 20s. The action leaps across years and locales, then takes a giant leap farther back than its beginning, then starts its forward jumps all over again.

Gradually several principal characters emerge. Primarily students, burgeoning writers, nascent newspaper and magazine editors and voluble philosophers forming conclaves, they face exile, prison, even hanging, as their striving for a socialist democracy runs afoul of imperial censorship and persecution.

These characters are: Nicholas Stankevich, gentle dreamer filled with German romantic philosophy; awkward but impassioned literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, disgusted with Russian literature other than Pushkin and Gogol and eager to open Russia to enlightened European influences; and Alexander Herzen, journalist, political thinker and tireless advocate of Western- style socialism.

Budding Poet, Mooching Radical

We also meet young Ivan Turgenev, not as yet a novelist but an enthusiastic hunter and sportsman and budding poet. Also the newly civilian Michael Bakunin, future anarchist, now a somewhat scatty, mooching radical.

Further, the four Bakunin daughters: tragic Liubov, when not yearning for slow-to-reciprocate Stankevich, doomed like him by TB; Varenka, lovelessly married to a dull officer and already a mother; Tatiana, like many others, under the sway of George Sand's romantic feminism, now flirting with her not unresponsive brother, now smitten with the otherwise preoccupied Belinsky. Finally, the youngest, Alexandra, giggly and mischievous.

Undoubtedly, the youngest must have black eyes...

There are others to advance and complicate the several plots with which Stoppard stuffs the play to bursting. For those unfamiliar with Russian history and literature, not to mention influential German thinkers from Fichte and Schelling to Kant and Hegel, this can be quite an overload.

Clever Harangues

Granted, Stoppard delivers clever harangues and tart epigrams from drolly idiosyncratic characters, but all their twisting and turning becomes exhausting to follow. That Jack O'Brien -- a practiced hand with Stoppard's gnarly dramaturgy -- is the cleverest of directors can be both stimulating and overwhelming. Often thrilled but sometimes clobbered, we reel between flights of verbal fancy and intricacies of staging.

Stoppard has made a few changes since the plays had their London premiere. He and O'Brien have abandoned the projections of specific locations that earlier gave a clear sense of setting. What we get at the Beaumont is a shiny, circular, elegantly patterned floor. In the back are parallel, diaphanous curtains with loosely wavy bottoms, allowing for greater or lesser visibility of huddled masses of serfs, and sometimes a bit of action, such as a servant being chased by her whip-wielding mistress.

It's Curtains for Us

Too much history lurks behind those translucent curtains, now as downtrodden serfs, now as insouciantly whirling skaters. The scenery by two masters -- England's Bob Crowley and America's Scott Pask -- is reservedly amazing and culminates in an overhanging ice sculpture that may suggest anything from a hypertrophic chandelier to a foreshadowing of cinema's ``Doctor Zhivago.''

It is bountifully supplemented by Catherine Zuber's understatedly evocative costumes and Brian MacDevitt's unobtrusively dramatic lighting. Watching all this is like dying and going -- a trifle prematurely and unpreparedly -- to an alien heaven.

The acting is mostly admirable from a populous cast of both major and minor players. To list only my personal favorites (yours, with equal justice, may be different), I adduce David Harbour's naively generous, sweetly impractical Stankevich and Billy Crudup's passionately admonishing, sublimely unworldly Belinsky. Also Martha Plimpton's at first carping but eventually pragmatic Varenka and Jennifer Ehle's fragile but not spineless Liubov.

Telling, too, are David Cromwell's pompous but effective essayist; David Pittu's compromising yet self-deludedly brave editor; Amy Irving's meddling Bakunin mother and, footling cavils aside, Ethan Hawke's flashy but shiftless Michael Bakunin.

Future Promise

I have misgivings about only two actors, trailing too-heavy past baggage: Brian F. O'Byrne, often incomparable but less persuasive as Herzen, and Robert Stanton, good at playing American bumblers but less so as a jejune Russian academic and editor.

Still, how is one to evaluate performances that may evolve in future installments? And how pronounce on a play that has revealed only a third of itself? I was and remain interested, though not yet convinced.