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ceebeegeeLast night Duncan, Tesse and I ventured to the Village to see Arcadia at the Manhattan Theatre Source (LOVE that space--that's one of the places where we did Shakespeare's Women). I'd always wanted to see this play after reading a review of a production a few years ago at Arena Stage--I knew there was a young girl in it, and a lot of math, and it took place in different times. Plus I love Tom Stoppard.
The play was fascinating. The actors were all strong, with most of them very strong. The best included Septimus (played by Adam Devine, a friend of Duncan's whom I also know--he was originally cast in Dik and Jayne and had to drop out), Valentine, Hannah (AMAZING actress--she infused every moment with such charisma and thoughtfulness--I studied her a lot), and Lady Croom, played by an actress who was too young for the part but had the assurance and timing of an older, more experienced actor. The Thomasina and Chloe didn't quite blow me away--the Thomasina could be quite good but overdid, I think, the girlishness a bit in the 13-year-old scenes. She was better in the 16-year-old scenes. Chloe was a bit wobbly at first but got more sure-footed as the show progressed, although her accent was a little off, I felt. For all that, I think I missed a lot of the nuances of people's performances, because I was thinking so hard about the ideas and theories presented in the play.
Arcadia weaves several different abstract mathematical and physical theorems together to make them...well, not abstract. Which is awesome. I love the relevance of not only poetry (poetry has always been relevant to me) but seemingly utilitarian, coldly abstract things like math (in this play, algebra and geometry). Math illuminates the physical universe; it's another way of predicting it, understanding it, recreating it. Hannah and Valentine (modern-day characters) find notebooks of Thomasina's where she iterates algorithms, a way of reducing natural phenomenon to a mathematical function. I'm assuming she extrapolated algorithms from observed phenomena, or maybe it was trial and error, experimenting with known algorithms to try to predict new ones, and then testing them out. The play went so fast I know I missed a lot. But Valentine makes reference to the guesswork necessarily involved in math and science--he talks about how you'll have a few notes and you have to imagine the whole song and try to piece it together. But anyway with algorithms, you can reduce all natural phenomena to a formula, and from any formula you can recreate all natural phenomena--in theory, a perfectly deterministic universe. But, as Valentine says, in practice, something ("noise") always interferes, something will interrupt and disrupt the equation, be it predators, sex, human emotion--the chaos theory.
In another example, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that in any physical or chemical process, energy is diffused, "lost"--in other words, things fall apart. The Entropy Effect. In a broader sense, this means eventually the universe will cool and die--"So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold," as Septimus says. Math is no longer cold and pure; it now intersects with eschatology. And intersects again with human events in the play--we find out in the second act that Thomasina will die in a fire the night before her 17th birthday, and the knowledge hung in the air for me. Things fall apart. Everything dies. The determinism of the universe is made real and terrible--this beautiful sweet girl will die horribly, we know it will happen, because it has already happened (another theme touched on is that all times are one, which is also a physical/mathematical expression of an eschatological theme). Oh, man.
The ending is awful, and heartbreaking, and so, so beautiful at the same time. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore. Waltzing timelessly.
The play was fascinating. The actors were all strong, with most of them very strong. The best included Septimus (played by Adam Devine, a friend of Duncan's whom I also know--he was originally cast in Dik and Jayne and had to drop out), Valentine, Hannah (AMAZING actress--she infused every moment with such charisma and thoughtfulness--I studied her a lot), and Lady Croom, played by an actress who was too young for the part but had the assurance and timing of an older, more experienced actor. The Thomasina and Chloe didn't quite blow me away--the Thomasina could be quite good but overdid, I think, the girlishness a bit in the 13-year-old scenes. She was better in the 16-year-old scenes. Chloe was a bit wobbly at first but got more sure-footed as the show progressed, although her accent was a little off, I felt. For all that, I think I missed a lot of the nuances of people's performances, because I was thinking so hard about the ideas and theories presented in the play.
Arcadia weaves several different abstract mathematical and physical theorems together to make them...well, not abstract. Which is awesome. I love the relevance of not only poetry (poetry has always been relevant to me) but seemingly utilitarian, coldly abstract things like math (in this play, algebra and geometry). Math illuminates the physical universe; it's another way of predicting it, understanding it, recreating it. Hannah and Valentine (modern-day characters) find notebooks of Thomasina's where she iterates algorithms, a way of reducing natural phenomenon to a mathematical function. I'm assuming she extrapolated algorithms from observed phenomena, or maybe it was trial and error, experimenting with known algorithms to try to predict new ones, and then testing them out. The play went so fast I know I missed a lot. But Valentine makes reference to the guesswork necessarily involved in math and science--he talks about how you'll have a few notes and you have to imagine the whole song and try to piece it together. But anyway with algorithms, you can reduce all natural phenomena to a formula, and from any formula you can recreate all natural phenomena--in theory, a perfectly deterministic universe. But, as Valentine says, in practice, something ("noise") always interferes, something will interrupt and disrupt the equation, be it predators, sex, human emotion--the chaos theory.
In another example, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that in any physical or chemical process, energy is diffused, "lost"--in other words, things fall apart. The Entropy Effect. In a broader sense, this means eventually the universe will cool and die--"So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold," as Septimus says. Math is no longer cold and pure; it now intersects with eschatology. And intersects again with human events in the play--we find out in the second act that Thomasina will die in a fire the night before her 17th birthday, and the knowledge hung in the air for me. Things fall apart. Everything dies. The determinism of the universe is made real and terrible--this beautiful sweet girl will die horribly, we know it will happen, because it has already happened (another theme touched on is that all times are one, which is also a physical/mathematical expression of an eschatological theme). Oh, man.
The ending is awful, and heartbreaking, and so, so beautiful at the same time. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore. Waltzing timelessly.
