Into the woods with Tom Stoppard

Sir Tom Stoppard in thermodynamic repose.

I do love Arcadia; I've loved it ever since I read it, before I'd ever seen it.  To me, it's Tom Stoppard's best play - and certainly one of the classics of the twentieth century - even if it's not his most original, and even if I'm not really prepared to defend its achievement against such possible rivals as Travesties or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

The "trouble" with Arcadia, of course, is that it's so synthetic, and its organizing structure so brazenly borrowed from A.S. Byatt's Possession (almost as compensation, you sometimes think, the playwright offers a Stoppard-like antagonist to a Byatt-like scholar right in the middle of the script), while many of its debates, as Boston Lowbrow's Bryce Lambert points out, are stolen from James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science.  But even if by borrowed means, Stoppard conjures in Arcadia an elaborate entertainment (indeed, an old-fashioned play of ideas) that perfectly balances his frisky wit with a mournful awareness of life's terrible vicissitudes - as well as breezy discussions of not only poetry, landscape architecture, and the Romantic period, but also chaos theory, fractal geometry, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (with Fermat's Last Theorem thrown in as a kind of aperitif).

Stoppard's conceit is that even as we watch a set of academic sleuths in the present day dig about in an English country house for clues about Lord Byron (who once visited), we can simultaneously watch, through some sort of time warp, the historical record of that fateful weekend back in 1809.  Today's intellectuals rattle on about sex and the romantic imagination; little do they know that their counterparts two centuries ago were consumed instead with thoughts of sex and science - largely because a precocious mathematical prodigy was on the premises, in the person of young Thomasina Coverly (note the similarity of that first name to Stoppard's own, Tomáš - yes, his ego et in Arcadia). She was the real "genius" of the house, not Byron, although her achievements, like her short life, were lost; our real history is always a secret, Stoppard whispers to us (thus Thomasina's descendant in the present day won't speak at all) - even as he braids together C.P. Snow's two cultures of science and the humanities more intimately than perhaps any one else has ever managed; indeed, the playwright's final images are of the two ages (and cultures) dancing around each other in a haunting, entwined enchantment.

All this, of course, makes Arcadia quite a challenge - it requires a large, poised and articulate cast that can bring off serious debate and romantic feeling as well as high comedy (and a director who knows how to keep that delicate balance).  So it felt like a stretch for a fringe company - still, I had heard good things about the Bad Habit version (which closed, alas, last weekend - this is a post-mortem, but then that's kind of appropriate for Arcadia).  And I've often been surprised at what the fringe can do - indeed, every season a fringe show ranks in my top 10 for the year.

Greg Nussen and David Lutheran make their way through the thickets of Arcadia.

So I wasn't shocked to discover that this Arcadia was, indeed, a solid effort - wittily directed and mostly well-acted, with one or two stand-out performances.  To be honest, it was helped immensely, in my view, by being apparently acted by smart, quirky people who understood what it was about, rather than by a crowd of Equity actors attempting to simulate a professorial intelligence they didn't really have.  Alas, a few mis-castings, and one or two failures in acting energy (there was little sexual heat in this version) kept it, I think, from greatness.  Still, director Daniel Morris and his cast did well by Stoppard's ideas - and there are a lot of those in Arcadia; as should be the case with this particular play, you could feel the audience paying close attention to everything that transpired, eager to catch every multi-layered quip and witty aside (a sight not often seen at our larger stages, I'm telling you).  And I felt that the decision to produce the script on the stage of the Wimberley Theatre, in the round, proved inspired; I'd always thought of Arcadia as a proscenium show, but something about the arena staging, with its matrix of exits and entrances, resonated with the play's themes; the only thing lacking, alas (and you rarely get this anyway), was the backdrop of romantically ruined grounds that are meant to be seen outside the windows of "Sidley Park" - and which become freighted with more and more tragic meaning as the play progresses.

But this reminds me, I'm afraid, of the one great failure in Morris's otherwise astute direction - the play's final tragedy, which Stoppard never states directly (and which I can't give away without ruining the sad magic of its discovery) - didn't really coalesce in the audience's mind, I don't think, as the curtain fell (although perhaps it did after later discussion). That gap, however, was connected intimately to the production's other great gap - in the pivotal role of Thomasina's besotted tutor, Septimus Hodge, young Greg Nussen proved woefully inadequate.  Mr. Nussen is very nice to look at - and his voice is a pleasing purr; but his blandness was a constant reminder that, as they say, beauty isn't everything.  And his performance was a particular problem because Septimus Hodge is supposed to have the passionately beating, ultimately broken heart at the center of the script!

Luckily, everyone else seemed to know what they were doing - even when they weren't quite right for their respective roles - so generally the play moved forward without him. John Geoffrion, for instance (a frequent commenter on this blog, btw), brought a welcome spark to Bernard Nightingale, the egotistical, Stoppard-like Byron expert who stomps all over the work of the Byatt-like Hannah Jarvis.  Geoffrion was one of those slight miscastings in the show that worked pretty well anyway - he played Nightingale as more of a twit than a dick, and so the sexual tension between him and Jarvis went missing - but he threw himself with such eager fire into his rants on art and science that you didn't really mind.  Meanwhile, as Jarvis, Sarah Bedard didn't seem to mind the lack of tension either; Bedard is a beauty, and projected the right kind of skeptical intelligence as Jarvis, but she was always too calm for me to really believe in her slow burn - nor did I quite see her put together the script's great mystery in her head (Nightingale's thesis on Byron is an ego-driven fantasy, but Jarvis steadily works her way toward something like the truth).

Still, Bedard managed many a witty turn of phrase, and there were similarly nice turns from many in the cast.  As the smartly sluttish Lady Croom, for instance, A. Nora Long didn't convince me as a sexual raptor, but her drily rendered sarcasm was always delightful; meanwhile, Nick Chris was utterly believable as Stoppard's brilliant exponent of chaos, but didn't always have the sensitive vulnerability that surfaces now and then in the part (and which afflicts his entire eccentric family).  There were more consistently satisfying comic turns from David Lutheran, as an idiotically pompous cuckold, and especially Glen Moore, as his blowhard companion.  Meanwhile Luke Murtha was always sweetly intriguing as that silent brother.  But at the center of the production was a really spectacular turn by newcomer Alycia Sacco as the sparkling Thomasina - easily the best performance of this role I've seen out of four professional productions.  Whenever Sacco giggled, or waltzed to Chopin, or uncertainly offered a brilliant solution to an unsolved theorem, the show all but belonged to her, and you felt art and science dancing together (for a brief moment) just as Stoppard meant them to.

The houndtrap

The Publick Theatre's revival of Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound (at left) is perhaps almost too smart for its own good. And maybe not quite sharp enough for its own good.

Which isn't to say this Hound isn't friendly; it's just never frisky, despite the efforts of a large chunk of Boston's best theatrical talent. The central problem is that director Diego Arciniegas has weighted the script with a rather heavy sense of its own intellectual importance - he heightens the shadow of the Theatre of the Absurd, and draws out (while actually slightly obscuring) the script's inter-textuality, and has even updated the look of Stoppard's play-within-the-play to the inter-sexuality, if you will, of Charles Ludlam. And Arciniegas has made Stoppard's meta-play so very thoroughly meta that he has even thrown in an intermission, at which I found myself peeing next to one of the script's "critics" in the john. (I admit I felt my performance of the role at that moment had an urgency his lacked.)

But clever as he is, Arciniegas seems to have forgotten that the dramatic engine of this one-act (and despite its dilation into two acts here, Hound is most definitely a one-act) is a snarky parody of Agatha Christie - her moth-eaten classic The Mousetrap in particular, which I think is still running in London after 58 years (Stoppard even ridicules, and therefore ruins, the old Dame's big twist). Yes, yes, the script is chock-a-block with then-up-to-the-minute theatrical ideas; but Hound should scamper through them like a puppy, as it's basically a long-form skit, not a seminar.

Thus, while this may be the most self-conscious Hound I've ever seen, it was far from the funniest. You could have driven a hearse through many of its cues, and to be honest, only a few in the talented cast were at their polished best. Just in case you've never seen it, the script's hook is the slow interpolation of a pair of critics (called, in classic Stoppardese, "Birdboot" and "Moon") into a ghastly murder mystery they're supposed to be reviewing. But I was surprised to see Arciniegas going easy on my benighted profession (although I know, I know, I don't really act like a professional). In any real Boston update of Hound, of course, at least one of the print critics would have to be female (the sex talk could still work, just make her from The Edge) - but even beyond that, the roles are quite a bit more wicked fun than William Gardiner and Barlow Adamson seemed to realize (and Arciniegas didn't really differentiate his critical Didi and Gogo enough, either).

Meanwhile, up on "stage," there was fine, ghoulish work from Sheridan Thomas as the aptly-named Mrs. Drudge, who does both the literal and dramatic drudgery (a typical line: "Muldoon Manor, one morning in early spring"), and the amusingly over-poised Georgia Lyman as the deathly attractive lady of the house.  Meanwhile Gabriel Kuttner and Danny Bryck knew what they were doing, but hadn't quite given it their own spin yet, and on the sidelines some supporting roles looked even more under-rehearsed.  The effectively funereal set was by Dahlia Al-Habieli, and the atmospheric (if occasionally intrusive) lighting was by Jeff Adelberg.

But one last nitpick: at a famous hinge-point in Hound, Stoppard has one of his critics actually step onto the stage to answer a telephone that's mysteriously ringing (even though we know the line has been cut) - at which point all ontological hell breaks loose, and the critics are suddenly "embedded" in the play they've been watching.  Here, however, Arciniegas has his scribbler answer his cell at the last moment - a funny jab at local reviewers who forget to turn off their digital devices, it's true; but doesn't this subtly undermine Stoppard's intent?  I thought so; a better solution to the problem of "updating" this moment of inter-text (if it must be updated) might be to have the critic's cell ring first, and then be "taken over," as it were, by the phone onstage.  Just a thought from Mr. Moon here.