To Russia, With Actors

Travel Blog  •  Michael Yessis  •  11.29.06 | 8:48 AM ET

imageMartha Plimpton, who plays Varenka Bakunin in The Coast of Utopia, prepared for her latest role by traveling with her fellow actors to Russia. Moscow and St. Petersburg, to be precise. “Rather than dive headlong into the icy waters of ‘Voyage,’ ‘Shipwreck’ and ‘Salvage,’ the three plays about revolutionary thinkers from 19th-century Russia which make up Tom Stoppard’s epic ... four of us decided it might be wise—not to mention unspeakably cool—to go to Mother Russia herself.” Plimpton joins the growing list of celebrity travel writers and recounts her week-long experience in New York’s Daily News. “Nothing is ‘easy’ in Russia,” she writes. “You don’t just ‘get a taxi’ at the airport, for example. You don’t just go ‘grocery shopping.’ But it’s through these seemingly irrelevant inconveniences one gets a feel for the place and for the culture shaping our characters.”