NEW YORK (October 19, 2006) — The Tony-award winning actor Richard Easton was recuperating at a hospital Thursday after he collapsed on stage during a preview performance of the Broadway play “The Coast of Utopia.”
Easton, 73, fainted Wednesday at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater while making a dramatic exit near the end of the first act of Tom Stoppard’s 2002 trilogy.
The show was halted as Easton’s co-star, Ethan Hawke, asked for help from any doctors in the audience.
Easton was hospitalized, but appeared to recover quickly, said the theater’s spokesman, Philip Rinaldi.
“They don’t know what it was,” Rinaldi said Thursday. “He was OK last night. He was alert, lucid, talking. He seemed fine. Today, he is undergoing a battery of tests.”
Wednesday night’s performance was canceled and the audience sent home, but performances were to resume Thursday with David Manis, Easton’s understudy, Rinaldi said. Patrons will be eligible for a refund or exchange, he said.
Previews for the play, the first part of a nine-hour epic set in 19th-century Russia, began on Tuesday. It opens Nov. 5. Easton had been playing a nobleman, and father to Hawke’s character.
The cast also includes Amy Irving, Billy Crudup and Martha Plimpton.
Easton, a professional actor since he was a teenager in Montreal, Canada, won a Tony Award for best actor in 2001 for his work in another Stoppard play, “The Invention of Love.”
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