Theater review: Dazzling 'Arcadia' opens TheatreWorks season Theater review: Dazzling 'Arcadia' opens TheatreWorks season (June 30, 2004)

By Bryan Wiggin
Almanac Theater Critic

Tom Stoppard is a frightfully brainy chap. His play "Arcadia," magnificently produced by TheatreWorks, is crammed with intellect and erudition. And this production is as fine as you could hope to see.

The setting is Sidley Park, Lady Croom's estate in Derbyshire. The time alternates between 1809 and 1812, and the present.

In the earlier time, Septimus Hodge (Cristopher Kelly) is employed as tutor to young, precocious Thomasina Coverly (Allison Walla). She is so precocious, in fact, that she is developing a theorem that will explicate all the phenomena of nature.

The full implications of this are realized only in the present, when her descendant Valentine Coverly (Kai Morrison) expands her ideas with a computer.

Also in the present, looking into the past, is the self-dramatizing literary scholar Bernard Nightingale (J. Paul Boehmer). He is exploring old papers for evidence that Lord Byron visited Sidley Park, and that, while there, shot minor poet Ezra Chater (Mark A. Phillips) in a duel. But his triumph of proving this -- which wins him newspaper headlines and an appearance on television -- is undone by Hannah Jarvis (Jennifer Erin Roberts), a writer of historical fiction who digs up evidence that Chater died in the tropics of a monkey bite.

When we are in the past, we learn what happened because the people who were there discuss it as it happens. And in the present, we learn what happened as more and more old papers are discovered. (This is part of the "Englishness" of the play: rummaging through a house that's been in the family for centuries.)

As the play moves back and forth, more and more pieces of this jigsaw puzzle are put into place, until, finally, the picture is complete. And the picture is that of a universe incomprehensibly complex, yet sublime in the beauty of its replicating patterns.

Stoppard's play is dense with wit and ideas, and an almost daunting formality of speech. But he respects us by not simplifying, and rewards us with a vision that is profound as well as beautiful. The final tableau, in which past and present are brought together in a dance, is deeply moving.

Robert Kelley, TheatreWorks' artistic director, and Vickie Rozell have directed this play to within a hair's breadth of perfection: it's a dazzling accomplishment.

And, even in the smallest parts, everyone in the cast rises to the standard that is set. I don't have space to praise them all, but I can name them all.

Amanda Moody as Lady Croom; Clive Worsley as Captain Brice; Jessica Chisum as Chloe Coverly, sister of Valentine; Will Brill as the brother of both Thomasina and Valentine; John Mercer as Noakes, the gardener; and Brian Herndon as the butler, Jellaby.

The set by Duke Durfee, abetted by the lighting of Pamila Gray, has a beauty that is magical. The costumes of Fumiko Bielefeldt are rich and handsome, and dialogue coach Kimberly Mohne Hill has her actors speaking with the kind of accent I wish I had.

This "Arcadia" is an achievement of rare quality, a diamond of endless facets. Its brilliance may blind you at times, but it's a quality of light we're rarely privileged to see.

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