Arcadia, Stage Center Theatre’s latest piece written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Anna Antaramian, is a tale of intrigue. The show opens on April 10 and runs every Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. until April 24. The storyline of the play jumps back and forth between two periods of time, the first is 1809 and the second is present day. The plot of this seemingly complex play is rather simple; the characters of the future are researching the characters of the past and making awfully wrong theories of what happened in the past while the characters of the past are showing us what really did happen.
The overall theme of the play is that history, as all things in nature, repeats itself, and that the knowledge gained and lost in one time period is often gained again in another, only to be lost yet again. Thomasina, played by Erin Rigik, in the past, has unwittingly discovered complex mathematics and asks questions such as, ‘Could the future be predicted by a set of equations,’ and ‘Am I the first to think of this?’ Similar questions are raised again in the future by Hannah Jarvis, played by Melanie Bujan, ‘Can the future be predicted by a series of equations fed into a computer,’ and ‘Am I the first to think of this?
Furthermore, history repeats itself in all events, big and small, and especially when it comes to affairs of the heart as shown by the budding relationships between Thomasina and Hodge, played by Kyle Martin, in the past, and between Hannah and Valentine, played by Rand Ringgenberg, in the present. These two events in particular are very similar because we can never tell who exactly is teaching whom in each case. Overall the play, while confusing at parts, is fun to watch. It is amusing to see how the theories of the past were proven wrong by the little snippets of the past that were shown. It is even more amusing to realize that even though we may think we have complete records, we often make the same mistakes because our records are not as complete as we think and often our interpretations of what we think we have are wrong, driven by what we want to see and not what happened as shown by Bernard, played by David Ropinski.
The audience can also tell the actors are having fun with their parts, and that makes the experience very enjoyable. The set of this play is just really cool, and what is most eye catching are the different color drapes hanging from ceiling to floor. The rest of the set is rather simple yet, put together nicely.