{"id":389,"date":"2017-04-24T21:09:20","date_gmt":"2017-04-25T04:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.iannelli.us\/diderot\/?p=389"},"modified":"2017-05-26T13:41:51","modified_gmt":"2017-05-26T20:41:51","slug":"review-%e2%80%a2-arcadia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iannelli.us\/diderot\/?p=389","title":{"rendered":"Review \u2022 Arcadia"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the start of an era that’s being billed\u2014ruefully by some, blithely by far too many\u2014as post-truth<\/em>, in which insidious terms like alternative facts<\/em> and fake news<\/em> haven’t just entered our vocabulary but hijacked\u00a0the course of conversation, is there really a better time to be staging Arcadia<\/em>? Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play undoubtedly contains multitudes<\/a>, but if it can be pared down\u00a0to a single nub, it’s about the quest for truth, or perhaps truths, whether grand or esoteric \u2014 or put another way, to borrow a line from one of its characters, the quest for that which hasn’t been proven false. Yet.[1<\/a>]<\/sup><\/p>\n

\"\"

L to R: Dave Rideout (Bernard), Ladonna Wojtowicz (Lady Croom), Brooklyn Robinson (Thomasina), Tami Rotchford (Hannah).<\/p><\/div>\n

Arcadia<\/em>,[2<\/a>]<\/sup> with all the Edenic qualities that title evokes, is therefore a paean to insatiable curiosity but not necessarily to human endeavor in its service. The play’s Bernard Nightingale, for example, allows himself to be seduced by the ambiguity\u00a0left by that important temporal qualifier\u2014yet<\/em>\u2014to arrive at a flawed and self-serving hypothesis, and he then exploits the public’s unquestioning deference to his position as a university don as a platform to advance that hypothesis. He’s slimy, condescending, grasping, conceited and arrogant, none of which helps his likability in the least, though his motivations for positing the (mistaken) assertion\u00a0that Lord Byron was involved in an exciting, hitherto overlooked duel some two centuries earlier aren’t vastly different from those of your garden variety climate-change denier. He so dearly wants his speculation to be convenient and simple and true that any outliers\u00a0or uncertainties, rather than shaking his confidence, only have the effect of making him more resolute. Was confirmation bias<\/em><\/a> already in common usage when Stoppard was writing, or is that another term we’ve since recruited to help make sense of the post-truth age?<\/p>\n

The new\u00a0production of Arcadia<\/em> at Stage Left easily ranks among the theater’s best work so far. Stage Left has developed a well-deserved reputation for tackling idea-packed plays \u2014 not always flawlessly<\/a>, but always\u00a0in keeping with the iterative, refining spirit of scientific as well as artistic progress. And here, thanks in part to co-directors Kathleen Jeffs and Jamie Flanery, they’ve struck the right balance of play, cast and set design for a show that is impressively strong on all counts.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Chris Jensen (Septimus) and Brooklyn Robinson (Thomasina).<\/p><\/div>\n

That’s easier said than done. Stoppard’s dialogue might have the occasional jarring “fuck” or “dickhead” for levity’s sake, but there’s less Neil LaBute than Neil deGrasse Tyson about it, which can present obvious challenges to the actors who then have to speak with naturalism and conviction about Newtonian physics, Romantic landscape architecture and the study of grouse populations. Brooklyn Robinson, who plays the precocious Thomasina in Arcadia’s alternating historical scenes, is outstanding in this regard, and she has an equally outstanding mentor and sparring partner in Chris Jensen, who plays her tutor Septimus. Stoppard clearly wrote with a soft spot for this pair, and Robinson and Jensen do justice to the feisty period wit in their characters’ lines, the heft and boldness of their ideas, and the subtlety of their interpersonal dynamic. The solidity of this Arcadia<\/em> rests largely with them but not them alone. Tami Rotchford’s Hannah Jarvis, an author whom Nightingale (played by Dave Rideout) sneeringly regards as a mere dilettante, helps to buttress the contemporary scenes with a wonderfully nuanced portrayal that conveys her character’s habitual self-doubt without making her a pushover. By contrast, Rideout is a bit too heavy-handed in the scene where, bursting with self-confidence, he reads from his forthcoming lecture, and his English accent comes and goes like an Arcadian wind; but he brings the requisite authority to the role, and his pivotal polemic (“Quarks, quasars \u2014 big bangs, black holes \u2014 who gives a shit?”) softens beautifully as he quotes Byron’s ‘She Walks in Beauty<\/a>.’<\/p>\n

Bryan Durbin’s set\u00a0is practical\u00a0as well as attractive, with trompe l’oeil wainscoting and a watercolor-style garden at the back that seems to be a faint nod to Turner’s\u00a0The Vale of Ashburnham<\/a><\/em>. His lighting is inconspicuously\u00a0good, too, especially if you count the starry dots\u00a0of light that are quietly integrated into the rear of the set. Though not explicitly paired with cloudless climes, they’re a fitting backdrop as the lights dim on the two waltzing couples, continuing humanity’s endless dance out of ignorance and toward\u00a0oblivion.<\/p>\n

Arcadia<\/em>\u00a0runs until May 7, 2017 at\u00a0Stage Left Theater<\/a>. Tickets are $10.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

<\/a>1. On second thought, maybe that perception is skewed by having seen it on the very day when people marched by the thousands<\/a> to defend the pursuit of and, no less important, the respect for information substantiated by hard-won evidence. \u21a9<\/a>
\n<\/a>2. Given that the play delights in teasing out\u00a0connections of significance, I have to ask: Is there any merit to the observation that Poussin<\/a>, who painted Et in Arcadia ego<\/a><\/em>, also painted A Dance to the Music of Time<\/a><\/em>, which is evoked by the waltzing quartet in\u00a0Arcadia<\/em>‘s final scene? Somewhere, I suspect, a university don has published an academic paper on it. \u21a9<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia<\/em> at Spokane’s Stage Left Theater.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":391,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[19,9],"class_list":["post-389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-review-2","tag-theater","has-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.iannelli.us\/diderot\/files\/2017\/04\/Arcadia.jpg?fit=1000%2C667&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2GDPS-6h","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":68,"url":"https:\/\/www.iannelli.us\/diderot\/?p=68","url_meta":{"origin":389,"position":0},"title":"A Dandy Time","author":"E.J.","date":"September 24, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"The JACC in Post Falls, ID has branched out to include live in-house theater. 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