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August 4 - 11, 2000
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Language barriers

Vokes interprets Stoppard's Arcadia

by Steve Vineberg

ARCADIA

By Tom Stoppard. Directed by John Barrett. Set designed by Stephen McGonagle. Lighting by Michael Hirsh. Costumes by Eileen Bouvier. With Lauren Waisbren, Rusty Barber, Anne Damon, James Carroll, Jason Schuchman, Shelley Brown, Darra Herman, Tim Davis, Robert Zawistowski, Jack Sweet, Iain Bason, and Peter Stark. At Vokes Theatre, Wayland, through August 5.

Jason S. Anne D. The idea of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, currently in production at Vokes, is immensely clever. Stoppard

moves back and forth between an early 19th-century English country mansion and the same site nearly two centuries later, where two academics struggle to reconstruct the interwoven lives of the house's former inhabitants, the Coverly family, and Lord Byron, who may have visited it one summer. The play is a time-travel magic trick: Stoppard makes us privy to information that the late-20th-century researchers can only theorize about, so we get to see how close they get to the truth -- and what continues to elude them at final curtain.

Arcadia is both a high comedy set simultaneously in two time periods and a parody of literary scholarship, with its tendency to lose sight of the work at hand -- in this case, the actual historical figures -- in an effort to ride some professor's private hobby horse. The more maddening of the scholars, a self-important fellow named Bernard Nightingale (James Carroll), is a Byron expert convinced that his man killed a minor poet named Ezra Chater (Robert Zawistowski) in a duel over a woman, and that this previously uncovered episode drove him to fight in Greece (where he met his death). Nightingale's adversary, Hannah Jarvis (Anne Damon), is the author of a reconstructionist, psychoanalytic study of Byron and his romance with Lady Caroline Lamb, and she is in residence at the mansion, with the consent of the current generation of Coverlys. Hannah can spot the gaps in Nightingale's fanciful scholarship, but she's unaware of how her own attempt to prove the one-time existence of a hermit on the estate is just as much a rewriting of history.

Arcadia bears an obvious connection to both Travesties, Stoppard's funniest play, which takes off from the odd historical fact that Joyce, Lenin, and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara all appeared in Zurich at the same time, and the screenplay he and Marc Norman constructed for Shakespeare in Love. Stoppard loves to draw curlicues on the canvas of literary history. Here the only actual historic figure, Byron, is never seen; part of the joke is that, in the 19th-century scenes that alternate with the present-day ones, he's rarely mentioned. He was, we learned, a schoolmate of Septimus Hodge (Rusty Barber), who tutored Thomasina Coverly (Lauren Waisbren), and it becomes increasingly clear as the play unfolds that Septimus is far more significant to the story than Byron and that its true hero -- and true genius -- is the unheralded Thomasina.

Stoppard's play won kudos in both London and New York, and perhaps there's a way to make it buoyant and lyrical, and to provide a reason for us to care about the characters. Friends who saw the West End premiere were both charmed and moved by it, and though John Barrett's production at Vokes didn't have either effect on me, I must confess that I found the New York version so lifeless and poorly acted (except for Robert Sean Leonard as Septimus) that I slipped out at intermission. Barrett's cast tries very hard, but they lack the style to lift the play off the ground. Most of the problem is verbal, and I'm not just referring to the English accents (which are, frankly, awful). Stoppard's language is dense and sculpted and jokey, all at once, and if you don't get the rhythms just right, it grows tiresome and even impenetrable -- especially in this play, where the audience is asked to comprehend a mathematical theorem that's crucial to the plot. I kept getting lost; early in the second act I realized that I wasn't even sure of the relationships of the characters in the 19th-century story, let alone how the math worked.

Much of the burden falls on the actor in the Bernard Nightingale role, who has long, expository speeches (especially in act two). In an elegant professorial beard, wearing a perennial smug grin, James Carroll looks wonderful -- like a more twee version of Rip Torn -- but he stumbles over the thorny text. Anne Damon would be just fine as Hannah if she played less attitude and more action; she keeps commenting on her character, illustrating how irritated she is rather than letting her emotions emerge naturally from the given circumstances of the play. Lauren Waisbren finds the sweetness in Thomasina; unfortunately, as in Caroll's case, her vocal problems get in the way of her performance. Ditto for Jason Schuchman, as the present-day Valentine Coverly, who has the unenviable job of explaining the math. My instincts tell me that if Schuchman had been accent free, his acting would have improved 50 percent. Rusty Barber is a creditable Septimus, and among the supporting players, Robert Zawistowski, Jack Sweet (as the architect in the 19th-century story who plans to convert the Arcadia of the Coverly estate into a nightmare of Gothic affectation), Shelley Brown, and Darra Herman all have their moments. But the language is an obstacle for almost all of them, and it's the one obstacle any production of Arcadia -- indeed, of any Stoppard play -- has to eliminate.


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