Mighty Big Words: Arcadia @ UW Playhouse Theatre

Arcadia @ UW Playhouse Theatre
Weds - Sun, through May 6 // Tickets: $15 general/$12 senior/$10 student

The handy thing about the UW Drama Department producing Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is that you can pop over to the UW afterwards and register for a classes on fractal mathematics, Byron's poetry, English gardening, chaos theory, Romanticism and Classicism, thermodynamics, and maybe a refresher on Fermat's Theorem. There's a determinedly intellectual bent to the play, which revolves around a tutor, Septimus Hodge, and his prodigy of a pupil, Thomasina Coverly -- but in the end it's a love-of-life story, cheerful, poignant, and sprinkled with mystery.

As it turns out, Jessica Martin, who plays Thomasina, is a prodigy herself. Maybe this is just the role she was born to play, but her Thomasina would fly on a London stage. She's note-perfect: precocious, intellectually voracious, a spitfire who's flustered a bit by her approaching adulthood. Richard Sloniker is her tutor, Septimus, a natural scientist already pressing to keep up with Thomasina's intuitive insights, while extricating himself from a duel with a minor poet (on account of a chance meeting in the gazebo with said poet's wife, a woman of romantic enthusiasms) and flirting with Lady Croom (a hot, sniffily proper, yet gratingly-voiced Amanda Zarr).

That's all back in the 19th century; in the present day, scholars have descended upon the family estate to decipher clues that they hope are publishable as "discoveries" -- Stoppard tweaking academic noses on the difference between innovation and archeology. In this play, the present is just a subplot on rivalry, ivory towers, and intellectual exhaustion -- all the action is happening is Thomasina and Septimus's time, even if Jeremiah Davis (Valentine Coverly) and Katharine McLeod (Hannah Jarvis) make the most of their modern-day detectifying.

The play's title refers to a painting by Poussin, you'll be interested to know, explicated here. The line "Et in Arcadia ego" [I am in Arcadia also] appears on a tomb in pastoral surroundings -- some take that to be Death's line, some think it's about living life while you can. Stoppard would seem to manfully straddle both positions, yoking the universe's heat-death to a character's death by fire. As you can imagine, the wordiness -- close to three hours' worth -- makes the play sag here and there, not all the actors' accents remain strictly British, and not all converse with the insouciant ease that this kind of caffeinated drawing room comedy calls for. But if Stoppard is your cup of tea, Jessica Martin's performance is just what you've been waiting for.

Photo: Richard Sloniker and Jessica Martin, courtesy Frank Rosenstein.