Word: thomasinas
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...Arcadia" refers to the stately pleasure dome Sidley Park, built by a shrewd but merry widow in Derbyshire, England, in 1809. Its inhabitants include her precocious daughter, Thomasina (Gretchen Cleevely), who is busily deducing the physics of heat without the use of mathematics and to the astonishment of her dashing tutor, Septimus (Conner Trinneer), a craggy landscaper who wishes to redesign Arcadia in a more gothic style, including a hermitage and a rented hermit, and Ezra Chater (Stephen Temperley), a second-rate poet. Oh, and Lord Byron also wanders about the premises, though, sadly, off-stage...
...sympathetic figure in the play, despite his extensive philandering. Gretchen Cleevely plays the wise child with a sort of Margaret O'Brien chirpiness, which is distracting, but not excessively so; more troubling are the scenes toward the end of the play, which seem to propose the 16-year-old Thomasina as a potential sexual partner for her adult tutor. Granted, this was more appropriate in the 19th century, but Cleevely's mannerisms do not change enough in the later scenes to make her seem older than 13; as a result, these scenes leave the audience a bit itchy...
...Prissy, the comically incompetent slave in the film classic Gone With the Wind. Her panicked "Lawdy, Miz Scarlett. I don't know nothing about birthing babies!" became one of the most quoted lines in movie history--and in later years, a focus of criticism for fitting an "Uncle Thomasina" stereotype. Ironically, McQueen herself fought to humanize the role, refusing to perform even greater indignities like a watermelon-eating scene. By 1947 McQueen decided she would no longer play servants--a stand that effectively ended her movie career...
Arcadia, first staged two years ago in London, has survived the passage to Broadway intact, although the acting was generally superior in the original production. While perfectly sufficient, the present Thomasina (Jennifer Dundas) doesn't bring to this brutally taxing role of doomed prodigy quite the dancing-flame intensity that Emma Fielding did. And the new Septimus (Billy Crudup) has the aplomb but not the haunted intellectual uneasiness Rufus Sewell conveyed. A pleasing surprise, however, is Robert Sean Leonard, playing Valentine Coverly, a modern-day biologist and computer scientist. As Claudio in Kenneth Branagh's film Much Ado About Nothing...
...Nunn) should not obscure the fact that in Arcadia we have been given a major English drama, one of those by which, ultimately, the theater of our time may be evaluated. It is a play that holds up beautifully not only on the stage but on the page. When Thomasina, hungry for a new mathematics, exclaims, "If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell," we might have stepped into an Auden poem. When a formidable lady silences her brother by snapping, "Do not dabble in paradox, Edward...