Tom Stoppard's 1993 play "Arcadia" is a comedy of manners set in England at the turn of the 19th century. It's also a present-day drama about the surprising thrills and perils of historical research. It's about Lord Byron, iterative algebra, mortality and the second law of thermodynamics. And landscape gardening. And sex.
In other words, "Arcadia" - running tonight through Monday in Production Workshop's downstairs space - is complex and exhilarating, a Stoppard play through and through, with an intricate interweaving of disparate themes into a multifaceted, gemlike whole. The PW production, directed by Doug Eacho '11, presents an unusually dark vision of the play, relying on the strength of its cast and an inventive set design to draw out the nihilistic themes in Stoppard's script.
"Arcadia," which runs about two-and-a-half hours, takes place entirely in a single room at Sidley Park, a fictional English estate. The play opens in 1809, with 13-year-old Thomasina Coverly - played charmingly by Deepali Gupta '12 - and her tutor, 22-year-old Septimus Hodge - Boaz Munro '09 - somber but passionate, silently engaged in their work. In typical Stoppardian fashion, their conversation immediately veers toward "sexual congress," a subject about which Thomasina knows next to nothing and Septimus knows a great deal. But he quickly discovers, through Thomasina's uncomprehending gossiping, that he was recently spotted in a secret tryst in the gazebo with the wife of a house guest. Worse yet, the house guest in question - a lackluster poet named Ezra Chater (Arik Beatty '10) - knows about the whole thing.
Furious at this insult to his honor, Chater interrupts Thomasina's lesson fully prepared to challenge Septimus to a duel, but the tutor is able to talk him down - though only temporarily - by flattering his mediocre poetry.
Thomasina's mother - and lady of the house - Lady Croom (Emma Price '09) enters from the garden, trailing Captain Brice, her brother (Jonathan Migliori '11) and Richard Noakes (Jacob Combs '11), the landscape designer the family has hired to bring Sidley Park's picturesque gardens up to date with the latest fashions for the Romantic Gothic style. Lady Croom fiercely opposes the change but must defer to her husband. The group departs to greet a hunting party that includes Sidley Park's unseen house guest, the enigmatic poet Lord Byron.
The action then shifts to the present. The Coverly family still occupies Sidley Park, but the estate's defining presence is Hannah Jarvis (Ana Escobedo '11), a successful writer and historian studying the estate's gardens - she has access to the house's extensive archives and virtually runs the place. Her research is soon interrupted, though, by the arrival of Bernard Nightingale (Ned Riseley '12), an unscrupulous literature scholar hunting for proof that Byron killed Chater in a duel.
As the scenes continue to alternate from past to present, we learn more about Thomasina's budding mathematical genius, Septimus' romantic attachments and the havoc that Lord Byron wreaks on the stability of Sidley Park. It is one of the play's delicious paradoxes that the 1809 characters are always one step ahead of the modern ones, who seem to be constantly scrambling to pick up the leftover scraps, the remnants of the past, that will allow them to reconstruct what actually happened.
Viewers, trying to piece this convoluted action together for themselves, also become historians, and share in the thrill of discovery as the play's structure begins to make sense, epiphany after epiphany. But even as the audience members delve deeper into the mystery, they repeatedly find themselves confronted with more chaos and unknowability.
Working with set designer Jenny Filipetti '09, Eacho found a way to convert this process of almost-discovery into a stage design. The spare set is bordered by panels draped in white cloth like the kind used to cover furniture being sent into storage.
Over the course of the play, as the historians begin to find that the answers to their questions only demand more questions, the coverings begin to fall, revealing tangled webs of string, creatively evoking the multifarious complexity of the past that history can only roughly approximate. Combined with the striking lighting design by James Hart '12, this process of lifting the veil on yet more concealment becomes expressive of Eacho's vision for "Arcadia."
"I think it's a very dark play," Doug Eacho '11 told The Herald. "It's about this progression from order to chaos and how people deal with that."
At the same time, the play isn't all doom and gloom. Stoppard's script is also deeply funny, and though the jokes tend to be buried under multiple layers of allusion, the talented cast does an admirable job of bringing the comedy to the surface.
Escobedo and Riseley are perfectly cast in their roles as the dueling scholars. As icy, buttoned-up Hannah, the Apollonian to Bernard's ostentatious Dionysian, Escobedo uses an English accent with consonants sharp enough to cut flesh, and she handles the many registers of the demanding part beautifully. With astute comic timing, Riseley is hilarious as the affected Bernard, and the two actors develop an engaging onstage rapport.
As Valentine, a scientist and one of the present-day Coverly children, Justin Kuritzkes '12 offers a subdued and nuanced portrayal. Kathryn Rhoads '11 and Kyle Dacuyan '11, as Valentine's siblings Chloe and Gus, and Nicholas Rosholt '10, as Jellaby the butler, complete the strong cast.
Even though the show more than succeeds overall, PW's "Arcadia" also suffers a little from the production team's slightly cold approach. The second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that systems can move from hot to cold but not the other way, is a major theme in the play, and it is as true of theater as of anything else. Intelligent humor and emotional intensity are certainly valuable, but in Stoppard's "Arcadia," it's the sex that maintains a steady infusion of heat to keep the plot going. The PW production might have benefited from a little more of that intangible and unquantifiable something called chemistry.
