The JHU Barnstormers, the University's oldest and largest theatrical troupe on campus, successfully put on Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, one of the most esteemed playwrights and screenwriters of our day.
Like Stoppard's more famous 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which takes a whole new approach to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Arcadia is not a "feel-good" play that one can simply sit back, relax and enjoy. Arcadia, Stoppard's later play from 1993, is filled with witty dialogue, complex characters and plotlines, surprising twists and revelations and a stark message about the fate of mankind.
The cast of Arcadia should be complimented for their superb acting, aside from the fact that some characters were better at consistently maintaining British accents than others, while the director Nancy Murray and the rest of the crew should be proud of their collective ability to bring such a complicated play to life.
Arcadia, named for the Utopian idea in Greek mythology of living in harmony with nature, takes place at Sidley Park an historic home of aristocrats. The scenes switch back and forth between focusing on the inhabitants of the house from 1809 to 1812 during the Regency period in England and the residents in the house during 1989, although at the end, past and present converge.
The play starts in the past where Thomasina Coverly, played enthusiastically by junior Toni Del Sorbo, precociously asks her tutor Septimus Hodge (senior Bill Fuller) about rumors she has heard in the house about carnal embrace. At first, she claims she could never understand the workings of the world including mathematics and human sexuality without his help. Amid the tension between Septimus and Ezra Chater (freshman Michael Van Maele) over literature and Septimus's affair with Chater's wife, between Thomasina's mother, Lady Croom (graduate student Karen Manna), and the gardener, Mrs. Noakes (sophomore Rebecca McGivney), and between different combinations of these characters and others, it becomes apparent that Thomasina is no ordinary girl. She contemplates Newtonian physics, the second law of thermodynamics, mathematical calculations and the philosophy of determinism at such a young age and way before her time.
As supporting characters, sophomore Pierce Delahunt as Captain Brice and sophomore Matt Panico as Jellaby also contributed with their own spark and humorous lines to the overall commotion at Sidley Park.
Meanwhile, in the present day of 1989, three academics set out to recover the lost past. The moody and even rude Hannah Jarvis (junior Carol Santoro) is staying at the house of siblings Chloe (sophomore Michelle Roytman), Valentine (junior Jack Berger) and Gus Coverly (freshman Luke Mayhew) in order to write a book about the gardens and the supposed hermit of Sidley Park.
Bernard Nightingale (sophomore Rob Keleher), a foolish academic who is motivated by the desire of prominence, seeks out Hannah, another academic who shuns sexual desire for her intellectual pursuits. Bernard hopes to unearth the truth about Septimus Hodge and his relation to the poet Lord Byron, who stays at Sidley Park, but never makes an appearance on stage. However, Bernard's ultimate goal is to make a ground-breaking discovery in order to catapult himself to fame in academia. Meanwhile, his persistence leads to Valentine's interest in Thomasina, the girl whose genius becomes clear from the notes in her ledger.
Through extensive research, extrapolating and successions of trial and error that are not caught until it is too late, Bernard, Hannah and Valentine eventually piece together what happened to Thomasina, Septimus, Chater and Lord Byron. While their findings about these historical figures' fates are not what they expected, they learn lessons that can be ascribed to their own lives.
The characters in the past are left mulling over the same essential issues as those in the present. Thomasina and Septimus, as well as Bernard, Chloe, Hannah and Valentine deliberate on the conflicts between emotionalism and intellectualism, gut feelings and reason, science and literature, order and chaos, romanticism and classicism, childhood and adulthood as epitomized through sexual awareness and academic progress versus knowledge for self-satisfaction.
The mute brother Gus from the present actually appears in Act II as Thomasina's cousin Augustus Coverly and serves as a symbol of both the link between the past, the present and the future and the struggles of humanity that persist throughout the ages.
Without revealing too much, it should be noted that after a lot of confusion, the end of Arcadia fills in most of the gaps, though many questions about specific details are left unanswered. Arcadia leaves the audience with a lot to think about after its conclusion.
Certain mysteries about the characters are not completely accounted for. There is the implication that everything will be known someday and that even when all is known, life will not necessarily be more fulfilling.
What makes life worth living is first recognizing the emptiness and coldness inside and around everyone and then bringing "heat" to our lives with friendship, love and sexual connections with one another.
Arcadia runs through Sunday at Smirnow Theater in the Mattin Center. Tickets are $5 with a student ID.
