UMKC's production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia closes this Sunday, before our next issue goes to press. Because it's a fine production of a play touched with greatness, we're running a review here, now. Also, the review doesn't mention lights or sound or costumes, which all were fine, because, Christ, have you ever tried to summarize Arcadia?
Just a year or so back, when UMKC's Graduate Theatre Department often outdid the Repertory Theatre with which it shares a building, no theater event would get me worked up as much as the department's annual visit of faintly notorious director Barry Kyle of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
These days, the Rep is at last boxing in its weight class, but a Kyle show remains an event, a rousing education not just for his grad students but for anyone who appreciates ambitious theater.
Taking on Arcadia, Tom Stoppard's heady stab at a theory of everything, Kyle forgos his grand flourishes and instead contents himself with setting in motion a little galaxy. His cast circles about debating truth and beauty, thought and feeling, order and chaos, sometimes reckless and human but by the end waltzing along like the spheres of the ancients.
For all his daring and the relative lavishness of his productions, Kyle distinguishes this show by force and clarity of movement, by the way each stride or pause is a small revelation.
Among its multitude of related questions, Arcadia asks whether the kind of sparkling young woman Jane Austen wrote about might, had she been unburdened from the expectations of her time, have hit upon thermodynamics. Or anything, really. The more pressing question: If she had, or did, would anyone ever have known about it?
Stoppard gets at this through one of those split-storied narratives where contemporary researchers mine ephemera to uncover some specific mystery of the past and inevitably wind up digging into themselves as well. Arcadia imagines Thomasina (Anna Safar), a teenager in 1809, reaching beyond the classical geometry of her lessons for one that might capture the bulb of a rose as well as the arches of Rome. She complains to her tutor of the inadequacy of Euclidean equations, "Armed thus, God could only have built a cupboard."
Later, achieving her breakthroughs, she's still a giggly kid, never entirely certain whether she's larking on or leaping forward a century and a half.
When I first learned of her insights, I felt something like that warm gush of discovery I experienced the first time I stared skyward with a star-map: Creation is boundless, but we have it in us to apprehend it.
We only discover those discoveries in the present-day scenes, in which academics research the history of the British country home where all this -- and much, much more -- transpired. Nightingale, a cocksure literature professor (Tyler Horn), is interested in some half-imagined adventure of Lord Byron's in the vicinity; his foil Hannah (Dina Kirschenbaum), an unappreciated devotee to reason, pursues the history of the estate's garden. (Her theory: The British garden of the early 19th century marks the breakdown of Enlightenment thinking.)
Neither at first understands or appreciates Thomasina's insights. Nightingale, as grand a douche as you'll ever see onstage, can't quite believe that even a woman of today might hit upon a truth.
As always, Kyle's leads achieve excellence. Safar is paired with the strapping Zachary M. Andrews, who cuts a suitably Byronic figure as the tutor Septimus: moody, rakish, sometimes full of shit, and sometimes both awed and aroused by his protege. Safar twinkle-toes about, all girlish excitement and adolescent longing, applying her considerable comic gifts to the role but also daring to grate a little. Her Thomasina wants to be darling and tries to be darling, and sometimes isn't at all. (This I found darling.)
Andrews looms over Safar. Sitting on a footstool, he's still taller than she is standing. The same applies to the present-day couple, a symmetry Kyle emphasizes. Stranded in our world rather than the Romantic one, Horn and Kirschenbaum don't get to break our hearts, as Safar and Andrews do. Their academics just try to make sense of it all. Those efforts -- their failures and qualified successes -- are no less moving.
Arcadia will be performed in the Spencer Theatre at UMKC's Performing Arts Center, 4949 Cherry, at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. For tickets, call 816-235-6222.
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