Word: stopparded
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...Freshman Theater Program's production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia seems decidedly more professional than most student productions, it is hardly a coincidence. The director of the show, one actor and the lighting, set and costume designers are professionals, hired to guide and work alongside the newly arrived first-years who make up most of the cast and technical crew. What is most remarkable about this Arcadia, however, is that the student actors are nearly as polished as the professionals...
...Second Law of Thermodynamics, iterated algorithms, Byron's poetry and the transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism in England. That Arcadia is not exactly an accessible work did not bother the audience in the Agassiz Theatre, however, who took the self-conscious intellectualism in stride and laughed along with Stoppard's absolutely breathtaking word- and idea-play...
...Arnold, the best the actors achieve is a consistent and inoffensive muddle of British and American English. On balance, the present-day scenes are slightly better than those set in the past. Robertson and Arnold are excellent in their exchanges with each other; they recognize the extreme dryness of Stoppard's wit and construct their characters accordingly. Geordie Broadwater '04 is also outstanding in these scenes as Valentine Coverly, a member of the family that still lives at Sidley Park. Broadwater is weighted with many of the monologues in which Stoppard attempts to give five-minute explanations of chaos theory...
...where past and present play out simultaneously in a beautifully directed finale that leaves little to be desired from the production as a whole. It is easy when reading Arcadia to suspect that the best production would be the most transparent, putting the least distance between the audience and Stoppard's words. Demers' Arcadia provides a sound and satisfying refutation of this notion, supplying a set of rich visuals and excellent performances that make this production nearly as sensual as it is intellectual...
Despite the over-eager report in last week's paper, Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, this year's incarnation of the Freshman Theater Project, actually opens this weekend in the Agassiz Theater. So if you were hungry for chaos theory, the squabbles of literary historians and Romantic theories of landscaping last weekend but just couldn't tear yourself away from that problem set, you're in luck...