Elyse Myrto in The Guardsman Photo: Craig Schwartz
A Noise Within (ANW) presents the first production in their 25th Anniversary Season, Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia, directed by Geoff Elliott, beginning on Sunday, September 4 and performing through Sunday, November 20, with a press opening on September 10. The company previously performed Arcadia as part of its reading series, Words Within, in January 2016.
On Wednesday, September 7 at 6:00 p.m., Dr. Julia Greer, Professor of Materials, Science, and Mechanics at the California Institute of Technology, known for popularizing science for the less scientifically-inclined, leads a fun and engaging talk prior to the performance. Focused on demystifying the play’s scientific themes, Greer will uncover the relatability of the play’s scientific references, like Fermat’s last theorem (1637), iterative algorithms, Chaos Theory, and the second law of thermodynamics.
Director Geoff Elliott says, “Arcadia is a carefully constructed and brilliantly crafted play. Every time I read it, just like chaos theory itself, something new occurs for me. In an extraordinary way, Stoppard has seamlessly woven complex scientific ideas into the heart of the play.”
“This play beautifully illustrates the intersection between science and art,” Elliott continues, “It’s funny, clever, and this production really examines the incredible sexuality bubbling beneath the surface of all the characters, past and present.”
Arcadia, which concerns the relationship between past and present, order and disorder, and certainty and uncertainty, is set in Sidley Park, an English country house in Derbyshire, and takes place in both 1809 to 1812 and the present day. The activities of two modern scholars and the house’s current residents are juxtaposed with those of the people who lived there in the earlier period – Thomasina Coverly, the daughter of the house, is a precocious teenager with ideas about mathematics, nature and physics, well ahead of her time. She studies with her tutor Septimus Hodge, a friend of Lord Byron (an unseen guest in the house).
In the present, writer Hannah Jarvis and literature professor Bernard Nightingale converge on the house: she is investigating a hermit who once lived on the grounds; he is researching a mysterious chapter in the life of Lord Byron. As their studies unfold and eventually overlap – with the help of Valentine Coverly, a post-graduate student in mathematical biology – the truth about what happened in Thomasina’s time is gradually revealed.
Elliott says, “Even the play’s construction mimics laws of thermodynamics: as it progresses, the length of the scenes get shorter and shorter until they converge in the final act, similar to the way energy waves behave.”
Many critics have praised Arcadia as the finest play from one of the most significant contemporary playwrights in the English language. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it one of the best science-related works ever written.
On Wednesday September 7 at 6 pm, a lively and engaging symposium talk, led by California Institute of Technology professor Dr. Julia R. Greer, examines the scientific and mathematical aspects of the play in an entirely new light. Greer, whose specialty is materials science and mechanics, has been an advisor to the production speaking to the cast and interacting with the artistic directors.
Greer says, “People have been extensively exploring the concepts of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics since they were first introduced. Within all the laws of physics – the law that entropy always increases, which is the main tenet in the 2nd law of thermodynamics – holds a prominent place – much because of its universality and implications to just about any physical process.”
She continues, “The intriguing mystery is ‘how does the second law of ever-increasing entropy in physics apply to the human world, where emotions and intellect not only perceive things but also interact with the physical world’? One could infer that the main scientific aspect of Arcadia is chaos and a lack of order, or entropy. The overall structure of the play, the development of each character, and Thomasina’s discovery of both science and her own self, as she grows up all demonstrate the intersection of art and science in its purest form. The play suggests that as long as we keep on asking questions, we will never run out of entropy.”
Single ticket prices for Arcadia start at $44.00. Contact the A Noise Within box office in person, via phone at (626) 356-3100, or online at www.ANoiseWithin.org for updated pricing and seat availability. A Noise Within is located on the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Sierra Madre Villa Avenue at 3352 East Foothill Blvd., Pasadena.
Praise for Arcadia
Johann Hari in The Independent (UK) said, “Arcadia is perhaps the greatest play of its time. At its core is the greatest love story on the British stage for decades. The characters bond over ideas – but some of the most interesting people in life do just that … the play stirs the most basic and profound questions humans can ask. How should we live with the knowledge that extinction is certain – not just of ourselves, but of our species?”
Brad Leithauser in The New Yorker said Arcadia is “a masterpiece … I feel irrationally, impossibly confident that Arcadia is the finest play written in my lifetime. One sign of Arcadia’s greatness is how assuredly it blends its disparate chemicals … including sexual jealousy and poetasters and the gothic school of landscape gardening and dueling and chaos theory and botany and the perennial war between Classical and Romantic aesthetics and the maturing of mathematical prodigies.”
Ben Brantley in The New York Times said Arcadia is “entirely terrific … a tale of two centuries in pseudo pastoral England, propelled by genuine, panting passion. But good old lust is only one complicating element within the deeper impulse that animates both the characters in Arcadia and the play itself. That is the unquenchable human urge to acquire knowledge, whether carnal, mathematical, historical or metaphysical. Success in these quests is irrelevant, since full and true knowledge of anything is impossible. As one character says toward the play’s end, ‘It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.’”
Terry Teachout in The Wall St. Journal said Arcadia is “one of the key English-language plays of the postwar era … Thomasina (Bel Powley), a 13-year-old child prodigy, has figured out the Second Law of Thermodynamics all by herself [which] means that the universe is slowly and inexorably running down, casting a dark shadow of doubt on the optimistic certitude with which … most of us today lead [our] well-ordered lives. Stoppard [is] a thoughtful, troubled agnostic who fears both the destructive moral consequences of radical relativism and the corrosive effects of imperfectly understood scientific discoveries on man’s hopeful yet fragile soul.”
Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE FRSL (born Tomáš Straussler; 3 July 1937) is a British playwright, who was knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil, The Russia House, and Shakespeare in Love, and has received an Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with explorations of linguistics and philosophy. Stoppard has been a key playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the three years prior (1943–46) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Symposium, Conversations, and Pay What You Can
The engagement of Arcadia includes a symposium with a lecture from Dr. Julia Greer on Wednesday, Sept 7 at 6 pm and post-performance conversations with the artists on Friday, September 30 at 8:00 pm, Sunday, October 30 at 2:00 pm, and Friday, November 11 at 8:00 pm.
Dr. Julia R. Greer’s research focuses on creating 3-dimensional nano-architectures and designing experiments to assess their properties. These architected meta-materials have multiple applications as biomedical devices, battery electrodes, and lightweight structural materials and provide a rich “playground” for fundamental science. Greer has S.B. in Chemical Engineering (minor in Advanced Music Performance) from MIT in 1997, Ph.D. in Materials Science from Stanford, worked at Intel (2000-03) and was a post-doc at PARC (2005-07). Julia joined Caltech in 2007 and has appointments in Materials Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Medical Engineering.
Pay What You Can tickets (Thursday, Sept 8 at 7:30 pm) go on sale at the box office window the day of the performance, starting at 2pm, and are sold on a cash-only basis based on availability; limit of two tickets per person.
About the 25th Anniversary Season 2016-2017 – Beyond our Wildest Dreams
The theme of the season Beyond Our Wildest Dreams resonates with all of the plays for the season – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (Sept 4- Nov 20, 2016), The Maids by Jean Genet (September 18-November 12), Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid, adapted by Constance Congdon based on a new translation by Dan Smith (October 9-November 19), which all play in repertory this fall. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, adapted for the stage by Geoff Elliott (December 2-23, 2016), returns for its fifth holiday season in December.
In The Maids, Genet’s characters Solange and Claire are two housemaids who construct elaborate sadomasochistic rituals — an elaborate and highly eroticized fantasy world in response to a lifetime of abuse — when their mistress “Madame” is away. The focus of their role-playing is the murder of Madame and they take turns portraying both sides of the power divide.
Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid: As his medical debts mount, Argan, a man whose mental neuroses grossly outweigh his physical maladies, concocts a scheme to marry his daughter off to a family of physicians. High comedy ensues–replete with thwarted love, false identities, dexterous wordplay, musical interludes, and a healthy dose of derision towards the medical profession.
Next spring, ANW presents Shakespeare’s King Lear (February 12- May 6, 2017), Ah, Wilderness! by Eugene O’Neill (March 5-May 20, 2017), and Man of La Mancha by Dale Wasserman, music by Mitch Leigh and lyrics by Joe Darion (March 26-May 21, 2017), which round out their celebratory season. With Lear and Man of La Mancha being performed on the same set, audiences will be able to see both plays performed on the same day in The Great Escape, on two days– Saturday April 22 and Saturday May 6.
About A Noise Within
A Noise Within, celebrating its 25th Anniversary during the 2016-2017 season, was recently named “one of the nation’s premier classical repertory companies” by The Huffington Post, and is a leading regional producer based in Pasadena, CA. ANW’s award-winning resident company practices a rotating repertory model at their state-of-the-art, 283-seat performing space. This venue, established in 2011, has allowed ANW to expand its audience, surpassing its previous box office, subscription, and attendance records each year. In addition to producing world-class performances of classical theatre, the organization runs robust education programs committed to inspiring diverse audiences of all ages. Helmed by Producing Artistic Directors Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, who hold MFAs from San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, A Noise Within truly delivers Classic Theatre, Modern Magic. www.anoisewithin.org
