The Rep Reclines On The Shores Of Arcadia

Tom Stoppard writes for smart people really well. That means audiences as well as the characters in his plays.

In Arcadia—which the Yale Repertory Theatre is staging for smart audiences through Oct. 25 at the Yale University Theater, 222 York St. — Stoppard is dealing with true geniuses. One is the legendary British poet Lord Byron, who is never seen onstage but is on the minds of the main characters throughout the whole play. Another springs whole from Stoppard’s ingenious mind: a 13-year-old early-19th-century math prodigy named Thomasina Coverly, who doesn’t get the acclaim she deserves because of a series of circumstances, misunderstandings and chauvinistic assumptions. That sensitive plotl ine has made Arcadia a modern classic and one of the most produced of all Tom Stoppard’s plays.

Stoppard totally nails how people behave around the truly intelligent. Just as impressively, he perfectly depicts those who act much smarter than they are; in Arcadia, that would be the pretentious 20th-century literary scholar Bernard Nightingale (delivered at the Rep with exhilirating exasperation by Stephen Barker Turner), who has insinuated himself into the household of a biographer whose work he despises (Hannah Jarvis, played here by Rene Augesen) because he senses that there’s a sensational Byron-related discovery to be made on the grounds of the gorgeous old estate where Hannah lives and works.

Arcadia​‘s two separate narratives take place in the same house in Sidley Park, Derbyshire, England, but in two time zones. There are the 1809 scenes, where you see how folks related to each other according to the manners and passions of the time. Then you see the same manor as it appears today (or at least in 1993, when Stoppard wrote the play), with a different group of people, some of whom are related to the earlier ensemble. The present-day bunch not only inform the play with their own modern morals and behavior; they are actively interested in the characters from the earlier-set scenes. Their guesses about the situations and motivations of their forebears add a lot of insight, not to mention humor, to Arcadia.

A very good cast has been assembled to put Arcadia across. But it remains Stoppard’s play, and everything is in service to his carefully wrought dialogue, his innate sense of dramatic structure and his bracing ideas about modern thought, modern romance, modern science and modern life in general.

Felicity Jones, who has appeared in seven Yale Rep shows in the past seven seasons (including an unrecognizable ogre in last season’s Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls), gets the dithery, easily starstruck role of Lady Croom, a woman which would be at home in one of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 18th century comedies of manners. Max Gordon Moore, who has filled out a bit since his scrawnier student days at the Yale School of Drama (he graduated in 2011), brings a natural charm and scruffy confidence to the role of math-minded 20-something Valentine Coverly. Moore personifies Stoppard’s attempt to make scientific concepts seem poetic. As she did last year as Blanche DuBois in the Rep production of A Streetcar Named Desire, Rene Augesen comes off as coy and attractive but not coquettish or overly vulnerable. Her Hannah Jarvis is kind and patient and strong-willed, and won’t be cowed into either a poor academic argument or a casual romantic relationship.

Many of the characters in Arcadia are ciphers, either revealing key elements of their characters or being roundly misunderstood or misinterpreted by others. It takes strong actors to maneuver this disconnection between how they appear and who they really are. All of the dozen cast members in the play seem aware of how carefully they must straddle these realms of perception and reality, as well as the shifting filters of how society as a whole behaved during the reign of King George III and the reign of Elizabeth II.

The Yale Rep production of Arcadia is the play’s first professional production in Connecticut, but the script is hardly unknown hereabouts. It’s had oodles of college and high school productions in the state, including at the University of New Haven in 2012. The undergraduate student-run Yale Dramat has done Arcadia twice this decade already, in 2010 and just six months ago. Student productions of Arcadia can have trouble catching the mature insecurities and true obnoxiousness of a guy like Bernard Nightingale, or of the play’s numerous other older self-absorbed, oblivious and impolite characters, but they have an advantage when casting the pivotal role of Thomasina, the sweet, smart heart of the play. There’s also the flirty modern 18-year-old Chloe Coverly to consider, and the dual role of the 15-year-old precocious Gus Coverly in the play’s 19th century scenes and his 20th (21st?) century mute doppelgänger Augustus Coverly, also 15.

To play the tender, young, brilliant Thomasina, the Rep has enlisted Rebekah Brockman, who played the same role last year in a completely different production of Arcadia directed by Cary Perloff for the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. For the rest of the teen-or-20-something roles in the play, the Rep avails itself of its pool of Yale School of Drama students, with the rakishly handsome Tom Pecinka as Thomasina’s hotheaded tutor Septimus Hodge, the red-cheeked Annelise Lawson (part of the 2014 Yale Summer Cabaret troupe) cooing coolly as Chloe Coverly and Bradley James Tejeda sitting and listening a lot as Gus & Augustus.

You’d expect this age-appropriate casting would provide a natural youth and spark to Arcadia. Strangely, though, these young adult performers don’t behave young enough. They seem too poised, too self-aware, too worldly. That’s probably due to director (and Yale School of Drama dean and Yale Rep artistic director) James Bundy’s production style, which is consistently, distancingly formal.

Arcadia is in a grand, purposefully grand, tradition of plays which James Bundy has directed at Yale. Other shows he’s done at the Rep — Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance in 2010, Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance in 2008 — have had similar imposing scenic backdrops of oversized rooms in magnificent old houses of out-of-touch wealthy people. Bundy also stages Arcadia (as he did Hamlet in 2012) at the Yale University Theatre at 222 York St. rather than the accustomed Yale Rep space at the corner of York and Chapel. The UT is an old-fashioned proscenium stage, which adds to the antique grandeur of Arcadia​’s large doors and windows, stacks of leather-bound books and elegant polished furniture.

The plays Bundy directs tend to be great crowd-pleasers — his A Woman of No Importance was an unexpected commercial success and his Hamlet (starring Paul Giamatti) and Death of a Salesman (starring Charles S. Dutton) were real conversation-starters due to their creative casting choices. But in the context of what else goes on at the Yale Rep and the Yale School of Drama, Bundy’s shows are quaint and old-fashioned. They’re not very visual or physical. They prize well-articulated dialogue over everything else. This is not necessarily a bad thing when directing works by Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller and William Shakespeare. Yet School of Drama student productions of Shakespeare and of some of Stoppard’s contemporaries have demonstrated how much can be added to these scripts with clever blocking, lighting and of course the hip new design element of projections. Arcadia seems ready-made for a clever young projection designer to use as a century-spanning canvas, but this production settles for a front-curtain image of a pastoral painting and little else. It’s the kind of set (and non-layered lighting) you could have found on a professional theater stage 100 years ago.

Some recent Yale Rep productions by other directors which plumbed some of the same social themes as Arcadia—Robert Woodruff’s high-tech adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata and Les Waters’ world premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s Dear Elizabeth spring to mind — and found imaginative new ways to illustrate the workings of the creative or hyper-intelligent mind.

The only truly provocative design element in Arcadia is Matthew Suttor’s original music, which merges waltz beats and a four-chord pop melodies into a fantastic form of classical grunge. Some credit should also be given to Grier Coleman’s costume designs, which not only bring needed bursts of color to the stage but make more biting statements about the characters than the actors do verbally. Bernard Nightingale, for instance, dresses in loud mismatched patterns that render him more ridiculous than any of the scholarly drivel he utters, and underscores his attention-grabbing nature. The female characters of both centuries are given form-enhancing outfits that properly accent the undercurrents of sexism, and just plain sex, that run through the entire play.

So while the Rep’s Arcadia is a well-realized, sturdily staged and thoroughly engrossing production, you just know it could be something more. You know this in the same way that Hannah Jarvis in the play says ​“I’ve got a good idea… but I can’t prove it” when conjecturing about events that happened a century earlier in the same room where she is standing. You know this because when Arcadia does occasionally raise its speed or volume, as when Bernard Nightingale erupts in sustained bluster in the play’s second half, or when various innocent pecks on the cheek threaten to fire up into greater hookings-up, or when Annelise Lawson flurries across the stage in exquisite comic relief. You know this because Arcadia is three hours long (with a single 15-minute intermission) and at that length such a deliberate pacing can become hypnotic in the wrong way. Stoppard’s ideas should be invigorating, not at risk of becoming a tedious lecture. Yes, the play itself explains that ​“Everything moved more slowly then. Time was different.” But I believe Stoppard’s being sarcastic there, and Bundy is taking him literally.

Arcadia is a play about knowing there is more to a situation than meets the eye. It is about discerning whether someone has truly raised the bar and achieved something that has not been achieved before. It’s easy to ask those same questions of this production of Arcadia and realize how it falls short. But Arcadia is also a play about patiently and carefully explaining new ideas, trying hard to respect the feelings and abilities of others, and offering joy and romance amid the oft-dry mechanics of math and science. On that score, this Arcadia does just fine.