Idealists struggle with the tides of history

NEW YORK -- Shaggy, vast, illuminating , and irritating in almost equal measure, Tom Stoppard's epic trilogy "The Coast of Utopia" is the odds-on favorite to take the best play trophy at tonight's Tony Awards. But it's also only one among several of the Broadway season's most celebrated plays that invite audiences to wrestle with large questions of history, storytelling, individual lives, and the relationships among them.

Also on the best play short list, for example, is "Frost/Nixon," in which Peter Morgan turns the 1974 boxing match between a fading talk-show host and a disgraced former president into a sharp, sad, profound exploration of hubris and humiliation that Aeschylus would recognize. As for revivals, besides the politically relevant but dramatically dated fictionalization of the Scopes trial, "Inherit the Wind," there's R.C. Sherriff's heartrending (and all too current) World War I story of life and death in the trenches, "Journey's End."

Let's not spread this umbrella too far; this is also the season, after all, of the anything-but-historical "Legally Blonde The Musical" and "The Little Dog Laughed." And it's true that "Coast of Utopia," "Frost/Nixon," and "Journey's End" may not seem at first to have much in common. But what links them is their abiding interest in the intersection between private lives and the public swirl of history in which those lives take place.

Maybe that description could fit any play that tells a historically based story through the lens of individual lives. But these plays share something more particular, and something that seems especially to speak to us right now: The men they focus on -- and they do focus mostly on men -- are all, whether they quite realize it or not, on the losing end of history.

Nixon, obviously. But Frost, too; though he scores points against his adversary (astonishingly created, rather than impersonated, by Frank Langella) in the Watergate interview, his shallowness and hunger for fame are what come through most strongly, and most pathetically, in Michael Sheen's acute performance. As for "Journey's End," though we know who won the war, the grim downward spiral of this story leaves us in no doubt that the men who fought for Britain lost their world, if not their lives.

And then there is Stoppard's sprawling epic of Russian intellectuals in the 19th century. His first part, "Voyage," introduces us to Michael Bakunin, Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky, and their circle in the first flush of youthful idealism. Part two's title, "Shipwreck," tells you how well that turns out, with our heroes exiled or imprisoned for their ideals. And part three, "Salvage," has exactly the air of weary disenchantment that you'd expect from a tale of survivors washed ashore in distant lands.

So why are we so curious right now about men who wanted to make history and ended up making a mess? Perhaps the theater is responding to a dispiriting strand of the zeitgeist: the fear that the men who run the world are running it right into the ground, and the parallel fear that the rest of us are finding our lives pushed along by forces too large for us to control. Maybe we worry that we're the Herzens of today, seeing too late that we've been steering a disastrous course and helpless to avert the consequences.

Or, heck, maybe we just really like British plays. It is interesting that these productions all started on the other side of the Atlantic, where history always feels more palpably present than it does in the New World. But it's also interesting that they've found receptive audiences here (more or less -- "Journey's End," after disappointing sales, closes today). Maybe, as the war in Iraq and the looming presidential race evoke echoes of military and political campaigns gone by, we can't help looking at the lost battles of the past in order to guess what the future's winning side might be.

It's worth pointing out that none of these "losers" could have moved critics and audiences so deeply if they hadn't been so winningly presented. "The Coast of Utopia," "Frost/Nixon," and "Journey's End" are all nominated for best direction of a play. Together, they and "Inherit the Wind" supplied four of the five names on this year's incredibly strong list of best actor nominees in a play -- and could easily have supplied that many more again.

Stoppard's work, especially, seems to owe much of its success to fine actors and imaginative staging; those who saw the original production in London have found Jack O'Brien's New York version far superior, and on the page the three plays' long, heady speeches lose some of the fire they gained in the impassioned performances of Brían F. O'Byrne, Ethan Hawke, Billy Crudup, and the rest.

For all its bagginess, though, "The Coast of Utopia" builds powerfully into a complex and engaging exploration of -- to oversimplify absurdly -- the human longing for life to make more sense than it does. It's that longing that leads us to study history; we imagine that by threading the individual beads of past events onto a common thread, we will create some coherent understanding of our past -- and, by implication, of our present and future. It's Stoppard's great achievement to remind us, by telling a story steeped in historical fact but transmuted into fiction, that no life, past or present, is ever as simple as our histories can make it sound.

"History has no culmination!" Stoppard's central character, Russian philosopher-in-exile Herzen, shouts at Karl Marx. "There is always as much in front as behind. There is no libretto. History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance."

Perhaps it's the terrifying fact of chance, its obvious power in our lives, that makes us look to the theater for our history. For plays, of course, do have an author -- a consciousness that links one event to the next, building individual moments into a larger whole. We may not be able to draw morals from history anymore, or to see the stories of our own lives. At a play, however, we can still imagine that everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Stoppard indulges this hunger even as he repudiates it. In one of the trilogy's most moving speeches, placed at the pivotal conclusion of "Shipwreck," he has Herzen both reflect on and reject our need to link past and future into a coherent line, rather than accepting the existential terror of seeing that we live only one moment at a time, this one, now.

"Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last," Herzen says. "Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too."

We can't, of course. But for a couple of hours, alone together in the dark, we can imagine that we have a firm grasp on the past.