Arcadia

Tom Stoppard’s 1993 Arcadia—his layered love letter to the slavish pursuit of human knowledge—is regarded by most as a smart play for smart people. But in the middle of Stoppard’s brain-teasing dramatic equation, the ditziest of the show’s characters proclaims that life is really “all about sex.” We’re not supposed to take her seriously, since she’s a sluttish coquette born into a family of academic rock stars. Yet despite the onstage presence of so much intelligentsia—the characters include leading poetry scholars, a monastic pioneer of landscape architecture, prodigies in biology and physics—Arcadia is very much a play all about sex.

Set alternately on a 1809 estate where a precocious young lady and her dreamy tutor hang out with an unseen Lord Byron (he’s Arcadia’s Godot), and in the present day in the same home where researchers try to uncover the past, the play brims with high cultural references and challenges its audience to engage cerebrally. But underneath, it’s about passions whose origins can’t be identified and attractions that can’t be explained. It’s smart all right, but it still has to swoon.

The Court’s attractive but for-no-apparent-reason revival has as good a cast as you’d possibly want, and they play the thing with deep respect. But while this is the best group of actors we’ve ever seen perform Arcadia, it’s also the first time we’ve ever been a little bored by the play itself. By the final scene, the only time the two eras are played out simultaneously, we’ve sat through two and a half hours of heady talk. Stoppard has set it up so that the prize we get for sitting through it is seeing two eras smashing up against each other like hot, colliding atoms. Alas, the final, crucial waltz, like so many moments, feels like it’s just going through the necessary steps.—Christopher Piatt