Arcadia: A Reflection

Since I got the previous post (March 6) regarding the current Broadway production of Arcadia, in which the writer mentions how a part of the play made him want to weep and …oh man, when they get to Hannah & Septimus turning the pages of Thomasina’s proof simultaneously in Sc. 7, I was a wreck, I’ve been thinking about the first time I saw the play.

It was the summer of 1993 and I was visiting a friend in London.

One day she said, “Let’s go to the theatre.”

“Yes, please” I said.

We checked the papers.

“Oh! Oh!” I said. “Tom Stoppard has a new play at the National.”

It was sold out but we went anyway in hopes of finding a seat. And the woman directly ahead of us in line returned two orchestra tickets.

I knew nothing about the play.

A few minutes into the first scene, while I was laughing at all the Tomfoolery, I was thinking: Has he written a period piece? Is this a Stoppard romantic comedy Congreve and Wilde hybrid parody? And if so, why?

And why all the mathematics and horticulture?

And then scene two began and I gasped—not metaphorically.

I was completely caught up in the literary detective story as it dramatizes the principles of chaos theory and the wonderful idea that all human equations get messed up by the unpredictability of sex.

And I was surely caught by the deeper experience of what Hannah describes as It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.

But something else was happening to me, something I wasn’t conscious of. Something more important.

One of the criticisms of Stoppard’s earlier plays is that all the characters sound like Tom Stoppard. In a 1994 interview with Mel Gussow, Stoppard says that in Night and Day he took a speech from one character and gave it to another, “…and it made no difference. I just needed somebody to say something at that point.”

Not so Arcadia.

The characters are individual, recognizable, and, yes, we care about them (an idea, by the way, that leads too many actors astray in their creative work—a topic for a future post).

But good characterization is not enough to account for …and you want to weep. …when they get to Hannah & Septimus turning the pages of Thomasina’s proof simultaneously in Sc. 7, I was a wreck.

In the same Gussow interview Stoppard says, “With Arcadia I got lucky….The more I got into it, the more I realized that this was going to work as a piece of storytelling.” But a good story and a great plot are also not enough to account for our deep engagement with the play.

When Valentine said Oh, the girl who died in the fire, I gasped as did many in the audience and my eyes instantly burned with tears. I was shocked: I hadn’t consciously realized how deeply the play had grabbed me.

When Hannah and Septimus turned the pages of Thomasina’s proof simultaneously, I too was a wreck.

And then Thomasina came out with the candle lighting her way on the night before her seventeenth birthday and tears heaved my heart.

What was it I was experiencing that wrecked me and made me weep?  What was I crying for as the couples waltzed at the end, each unaware of the other?  What was this last scene the culmination of?

This was not melodrama. These were not easy sentimental tears.

Something else. Something true.

Something acutely experienced of life missed because we have no idea where it’s heading. (Something in our tears for Thomasina that’s in our tears for Emily at the end of Our Town.)

Something of life shared with all of humanity even as we are senseless to it while we live. (We stand in an old house and someone says, ‘If these walls could talk’ and we all nod and grunt in agreement and move on.)

Something of lives lived in such seemingly meaningful detail becoming little more than random points in the fractal graph that represents those lived lives. (Uncle Vanya’s Astrov: Will people living a hundred, two hundred years from now…will they remember us in their prayers?)

Big Things like: What’s It All About Anyway?

As ideas none of this is new. It’s all pretty simple. Elemental even. So easy to grasp intellectually.

And therefore, so easy to avoid grasping experientially.

Hence, Theatre.

Dramatized for us by the poetry of theatre, the simple truths of these elemental ideas become the complex truths of profound experience. And as much as the intellectual ideas of Arcadia may share with the intellectual ideas of Our Town and Uncle Vanya, they all “mean” something uniquely their own in the actual theatre experience.

The poetry of the theatre is a poetry of the senses:

Early Nineteenth Century clothing and movement and language and Contemporary clothing and movement and language all happening in a single space

The sounds of human voices engaged in verbal duets and trios and more

Daylight and Candle light

An offstage piano and onstage waltzing

A tortoise, An apple, Three Letters and A Composition book.

And on and on.

I’d like to think that the levels of experiential meaning in a play that arise from the whole poetry of the theatre experience surprise the playwright as much as the audience. Even the great ones.
Chekhov knew the ideas he was after when he set out to write Uncle Vanya, but I like thinking he was as taken as everyone else with the complexity and depth of the actual immediate human experience it creates (even if he was not taken with the actual Stanislavski production).

Shakespeare and Lear? I like to think so.

At a Q&A after a college performance of Arcadia (I think), Stoppard said that not until he wrote Hannah saying She was dead before she had time to be famous did he know that that was what was going to have to happen to Thomasina.

I’m betting true genius amazes its human vessel as much as it amazes the rest of us. And there’s something in Arcadia that needed genius I like thinking even Stoppard didn’t realize was his.