Blog
Facing the Dragon
December 28 2010
Seeing Arcadia for the first time was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. I mean that. It was in London, 1995. I was on a spring break trip with a couple of my English professors and a group of fellow students. We had seen a number of other impressive productions already, but I left the theater that afternoon (a Wednesday, I think) absolutely awed. In fact I can think of few, if any, encounters with drama (theater or film) that have impacted me so powerfully.
I could immediately recognize its brilliance (that’s the first thing that hits you with Stoppard). And I knew by being there, in that theater, just bearing witness to this thing, I knew something had happened to me. I just wasn’t sure what. One of my favorite quotes is a maxim by Nietzsche that says, “I do not like it because I am not up to it, has anyone ever said that?” Well, I knew I was not up to it, but even still I liked it—and liked it in large part because I wasn’t up to it, because I could feel its greatness, almost feel it in the skin, even if I didn’t fully understand all of its intricacies. I wanted to be worthy of it. Smart enough to really get it. Deep enough to fully absorb it. Arcadia was the first thing I ever saw that made me want to be a better audience.
The play is dense, verbose, complicated, like most of Stoppard’s work. Its story, as with Stoppard’s dialogue, twists into marvelous, sometimes mind-boggling tapestries. And yet it is, in performance, largely accessible—not strange, not avant garde, just immensely complex. It’s erudite, sure, but also very entertaining. It’s clever (as all Stoppard is), but also downright funny, hysterical at times. It contends with big ideas (in fact, the biggest), engaging mostly with the dichotomy of Classicism and Romanticism, as seen through mathematics, scholarship, even gardening.
In fact, I can’t think of another play that deals with so much so well, as deep as it is expansive—all on one set, no less, in one room. It is, in a word, great. Capital G. To be placed on that same top shelf as other masterpieces of the past fifty years. Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. The Godfather, maybe? Scant others compare. And I’m hardly alone in this assessment. In the Independent in May of 2009, critic Johann Hari suggests that Arcadia “is perhaps the greatest play of its time.” He writes: “Stoppard compresses so many ideas and guffaws and griefs into less than three hours that any attempt at a summary of the play will sound paradoxical. It is an English country-house farce about the death of the universe. It is a laugh-filled tragedy about what happens if you take the intoxicants of poetry and science seriously. It is a play where Stoppard turns himself into a clown whose juggling balls are Romanticism, Classicism, and the meaning of life.” So there you go.
When we were given the opportunity to start our own theater company there was little doubt Arcadia would be one of our first shows. It certainly fulfilled our mission for doing smart, sophisticated, yet thoroughly entertaining theater. But we knew we couldn’t rest on the script alone. To pull off an effective production, we had to assemble a cast and crew worthy of the script’s intelligence, emotion, and humor. I’m proud and thrilled to say I really think we’ve done that. From director Ted Swindley to actors such as Denice Hicks, David Compton, and Jeff Boyet, it’s a stellar group, all up for the challenge.
And it will be challenge. In fact, when we first discussed making Arcadia our second show, one of our board members said, “So you’re going to face the dragon this soon?” How’s that for encouragement? But as fable tells us, dragons often guard treasures. And there are many treasures to be had, for the cast and crew, and most important of all, for the audience, in engaging with this particularly articulate dragon, a dragon that doesn’t breathe fire exactly, but some of the finest dialogue in modern theater.
Wes