In Which We Watch Arcadia

[shannon_a]

Kimberly and I have a long history with Tom Stoppard. Indian Ink at ACT was one of our first dates. We picked up some Tom Stoppard play books in Ireland, but found that reading plays aloud on your own is hard. We watched Invention of Love, again at ACT, that same year. We saw Rough Crossing at the Black Oak Theatre, and it was good unlike our more recent experience there. (What a difference more than a decade makes!) And we rejoined Shotgun Players so that we could see the Coast of Utopia Trilogy, which debuted there instead of at ACT.

So tonight's Arcadia at the Shotgun Players was, I think, the seventh Stoppard play we've seen together.

But we'd read it aloud before, I think as part of Kimberly's old reading group. That's where it's easy to read plays. (And Kimberly saw it previously when it debuted at ACT way back in 1995.)

Great play. It's a narrative in two parts, jumping back between the past of the early 1800s and the present of the late 1900s. We have the historic drama of a country estate at the verge of the Regency Era and the modern tale of academics ("academics") trying to figure out what happened. It's rather delightful as a mystery, with both halves of the story advancing the narrative, and it's rather delightful to see what the modern-day people get right and wrong. As an amateur historian myself, I really identified with their amateur historians in a way that I probably didn't when I read the play around 1999. It was particularly instructive seeing them talk about KNOWING something is right, but not having the ability to prove it (and then sometimes BEING wrong afterward).

But this is all mixed with math. With a very melancholy and symbolic discussion of themodynamics, with fractal geometry (though for some reason that phrase isn't used). And it all melds together wonderfully. It's a story about intuition and genius, about right and wrong guesses, about the inevitably of loss.

In many ways, this feels like a turning point to me for Stoppard, where afterward his plays got denser and more multilayered, and I didn't love the ones that came afterward like Invention of Love and The Coast of Utopia nearly as much. Oh, they had Stoppard's cleverness and wordplay, but they were on the edge of comprehensibility. Whereas this one takes those more complex ideas, but holds them back just enough (and explains them just enough).

Anyway, I did love this one in a way that I couldn't possibly have loved just reading the play almost two decades ago.

It's been extended at the Shotgun for another three weeks, so definitely go see it.