Arcadia is a very challenging play. It is wordy and dense and scientific and the dramaturgy is complicated. I teach this play in our Advanced studio every few years… a heady unit about “cracking the hardest play!” The text is just a juicy puzzle. Every class of students who’ve taken on the task of unravelling Arcadia have loved it. A crime drama and a love story, a period piece and a contemporary gem. It is intersectional and historical. An “old timey” play about math and thermodynamics. So romantic, right? To me Arcadia is a 123 page poem that may sit like a brick on the page - but when it moves - oh how it moves - Stoppard’s glorious language just sings.
When choosing a season of material that’s all about accepting change as a force of nature, Arcadia checked all the boxes despite its hubris and gravitas.
Themes of equality with strong women at the helm.
Complicated characters that are both hilarious and heartwarming. A demanding design worthy of our incredible scenic team. And at its heart, a brace of teenage geniuses who reveal the world to their adults without judgement or limit or doubt.
Thomasina and Augustus Coverly are deeply rooted in my understanding of the world - and my love of teaching.
If I look at every single student with the hope that I can help them find that magical thing that is so uniquely theirs, I have no choice but to keep showing up for this crew of intersectional, comical, heartwarming young folk I call our B’DAT Framily.
They asked me to produce “something hard, something really challenging”. Finally stripped of our COVID restrictions and the skill building delay, they were ready for “the real thing” again. I proposed maybe six other titles that they rejected before the community rallied with unexpected enthusiasm for this 30 year old English masterwork about algebra and art and gardens and poetry and architecture and “sex and literature”!
I read the play in college, and if I’m honest, most of it went over my head the first time. But early in my tenure at Beacon Harry Streep took the B’DAT fam of 2011 to see his niece, Gracie Gummer, play Chloe. A Beacon parent was playing Jelleby too. We sat way up in the mezz and by the end half the kids were asleep - rough to go on a weeknight - but the other half, Harry and I were weeping.
