Landscape, Love and Sexual Innuendo: BRLT Does Arcadia

A long, elegant dining room table sits at the center of the stage throughout the Baton Rouge Little Theatre's production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. Two sets of characters from two different time periods come and go, even occasionally occupying the same space at the same time, but the table remains unchanged, a much needed anchor in the heady, complex sea of the play.

When the director Keith Dixon puts a two page list of terms in his program for the production of the play, he isn't joking around; neither are the multiple web sites dedicated to explaining Stoppard's complicated swirl of ideas. As much as Arcadia tells a story, it also presents platform for Stoppard to question the relationship of science to literature, of philosophy to life. And so while watching Arcadia doesn't require a vast and thorough understanding of concepts like determinism, fractals and thermodynamics (I certainly don't have one), but a little reference guide couldn't hurt now and then.

Neither could a strong ability to focus. The play's seven acts are filled with an almost unceasing barrage of rapid fire dialogue, dedicated not only to advanced scientific concepts but landscape architecture, love, and multiple layers of some very nicely done sexual innuendo. Oh, and plot. The play has a plot, too, and one that takes some following.

Arcadia tells two, parallel stories from two separate centuries, that both take place in the same room of the same country estate. The first is that of Septimus Hodge, a tutor to thirteen year old mathematical prodigy Thomasina Coverly, whose mother's household is turned upside down by the presence of the Septimus's friend, the poet Lord Byron, and the ensuing romantic entanglements.

The second story is that of the house's modern day inhabitants, mathematician Valentine Coverly and his younger sister, Chloe, and Hannah and Bernard, two visiting scholars using the house for their research. Hannah already published a successful book telling the story of Lady Croom, and her affair with Lord Byron, and is working on a second; Bernard panned it but now needs Hannah's research for his own work. The present of the play discovers the past, the past reflects on the present and, as the work goes on, the two become increasingly interwoven.

A play with this much going on relies a lot on its cast to keep things moving along and the audience interested, and the actors of this production don't disappoint. C. Jaye Miller is a standout as Thomasina, both childlike and wise beyond her years, as is Travis Williams as the crafty Septimus. A few wooden performances weigh down the side characters, but overall, you have to be impressed by any group of people who can deliver that much information in British accent.

Like any great work of art or mathematical proof, Arcadia is as much about the process as it is about the result. When the curtain fell, it wasn't not really the plot's conclusion (a might hard to figure out, if you haven't been paying good attention) that stuck in my mind, it was the intense discussions each character had on the way there. Their thoughts about the world around them stick in the mind as much as anything they did.