The reviewer responds.

I have seen all three parts of The Coast of Utopia, and I think the remarks in my March 9 column hold good. In the interest of covering this limited-engagement show in a timely fashion, and given the strictures of Commonweal's production schedule, I admittedly filed the piece while I was in the midst of the trilogy rather than at the far end. For that reason, I referred specifically to part 1 when I was commenting on scenery and other aspects of the Lincoln Center staging. But when I made more general observations, I was referring to the entire trilogy, which I knew from multiple readings of the script before I headed to the theater.

Thus, I was quite aware that Herzen loomed large in the Utopia landscape. But because of my experience at an anti-apartheid paper in South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was particularly interested in Stoppard's contemplation of the enhanced value words possess in censorship-plagued societies, a theme closely associated with the character of Belinsky. It was for this reason that, when faced with a limited word count, I focused my column on Belinsky rather than Brian F. O'Byrne's trenchant performance as Herzen.

In any case, I will readily admit myself unequal to summing up the quicksilver wit and expansive vision of any Stoppard play, let alone the sprawling Coast of Utopia.