Managing Editor's Note

By Sarah Hart

With one sweeping coup de théâtre after another, Tom Stoppard's three-part The Coast of Utopia, grandly directed by Jack O'Brien, has been captivating audiences at Lincoln Center Theater since this past October. The scope of the plays—spanning 30 years, more than 70 characters and at least 5 revolutions and uprisings—sets a new benchmark for epic theatre and inspires almost rabid inquiry and discussion. Unsatiated after nearly eight hours of Utopia, I've added myself to the New York Public Library's waiting list for the four-volume autobiography by Russian thinker Alexander Herzen, upon whom Stoppard's trilogy eventually centers. I'm number 43. Epic theatre apparently holds a lot of us in its thrall.

Actors certainly know this. Take Jason Butler Harner, holed up in the corner of Lincoln Center's rehearsal hall, devouring the life and letters of Ivan Turgenev, the real-life writer he portrays in Utopia. For Harner, the epic nature of Utopia isn't merely the arc of European history or parade of philosophies in the play—it's the experience (which he expressively recounts in this issue) of its modern-day repertory company model with a 44-person cast and yearlong commitment. "I want the astonishment of real, fixed thought on the stage all the time," Harner quotes O'Brien from the first rehearsal—and that sense of wonder is contagious.

Another actor, Lorri Holt, tracks her own path in a different epic as she prepares to play Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare's Richard III at California Shakespeare Theater this month. "One of the great joys of being an actor is the permission to get a little obsessive when creating a character," Holt writes as she eagerly consumes War of the Roses history—both the factual annals and the Bard's revisionist versions.

A third actor, Carson Elrod (profiled by Edward Karam), has embarked on his own epic acting endeavor: performing director/adaptor Neil Bartlett's steeped-in-shadow, back-to-Dickens Oliver Twist at three theatres across the country. Dickens, like Stoppard, knew just how seductive parceling out twisty narratives in serial could be, and Elrod masterfully plays the story-spinner's role as the narrator of this macabre morality tale—as well as turning in a magnetic dual performance as the Artful Dodger. (He is also, Harner should be glad to note, plotting the creation of his own repertory acting company.)

Big theatre requires big thinkers, and in this issue actors Harner, Holt and Elrod test the boundaries of their craft with expansive ideas that suit the grand-scale works in which they're appearing. A great performance, it turns out, can stem from the same fascinations epic work inspires.