The Coast of Myopia: Ben Brantley's Short-Sighted Stoppard Review

I know I'm supposed to keep following the Glenn Lowry story, or some other artworld controversy (like the continuing "Pollock" follies, subject of this article by Geoff Edgers in yesterday's Boston Globe).

But I really need to rescue Tom Stoppard from Ben Brantley.

This morning, I finished reading the third play, "Salvage," in Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia" trilogy. Then I opened my NY Times to find Brantley's review of this last installment (which I will see performed on Thursday). He provided this astonishing summary of what Stoppard's dramatically weak but philosophically rich magnum opus is all about:

What can its surviving characters (and for that matter, its surviving audience members) say they have learned through all those years? Only that life is exciting, boring, generous, cruel and ultimately uncontrollable. In other words, life really is a mess, as consuming and capricious as the ocean storms that are evoked so exquisitely by this production's technical wizards.

Only that?

CultureGrrl feels compelled to attempt the difficult task of telling you, in a nutshell, what these cerebral plays---in which the main protagonists are not people but philosophies of life, history and politics---are REALLY about:

Some of the most compelling and influential ideas about history and society have been conceived by individuals whose personal lives and/or limited experience stand in stark contrast to the grand, abstract ideas that they so single-mindedly espouse. But the people most worth listening to (who are often marginalized by history, because their messages are not easily reduced to catchy slogans) are the more nuanced, broadminded thinkers---non-dogmatists, whose philosophies and sympathetic imaginations can encompass the real lives of the diverse, disorderly multitudes. For Stoppard, that's Herzen, as a political thinker; it's Turgenev, as an artist.

That's my literary sermon for today.