Theater : The Stage’s Favorite Quantum Mechanic : Tom Stoppard may deal with duality principles in his new play, ‘Arcadia,’ but he doesn’t do double talk.

At 57, play wright Tom Stoppard looks like a 1960s rock ‘n’ roll star aging with surprising grace and ease. His faintly graying long hair isn’t the only thing that makes the analogy a comfortable fit. He wasn’t much older than the Beatles in the mid-1960s when his absurdist comedy “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” made him almost as famous as they were.

Lanky, stoop-shouldered and dressed in what can only be characterized as elegantly disheveled dark clothing, Stoppard cuts a mildly intimidating figure, especially when he peers down at you with penetrating brown eyes that seem to apologize before poking a hole through your skull.

It isn’t just his presence that makes Stoppard daunting; it’s also his cerebral, imperiously witty plays, two of which, “Arcadia” and “Hapgood,” overlapped recently at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. The latter was extended well beyond its original Feb. 5 closing date; the former was in previews when “Hapgood” finally finished its run. On March 30, “Arcadia” opened to glowing reviews.

Both plays share with Stoppard’s previous work an inclination to challenge the mind as much as they engage the senses. They are complex, erudite--the product of what has to be the most capacious and intricate mind devoted to the dramatist’s craft these days. Sitting down to interview him, you keep thinking of all the eclectic ideas and issues he pours into his work and begin feeling that anything you ask will sound . . . well, kinda stupid .

But years of practice at both ends of the interviewing process have made ex-newspaperman Stoppard something of a Baryshnikov of the media dance. Even after years in the limelight trying to maintain a private life while helping raise four sons through two divorces, Stoppard remains, as he was once described by a British scribe, “a dream interviewee.” He is disarmingly attentive to even the simplest question. Like, for instance, what makes him write this smart, funny stuff?

“Embarrassingly enough, I often can’t remember how I came to write something,” Stoppard muses over coffee and a “discreet” cigarette in the Beaumont lobby’s lounge. His sentences arrive at a measured pace, each of them carefully, often artfully, packaged. “I don’t know. There’s an element of accident and fortune that’s really frightening. . . . I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over.”

“Hapgood,” an espionage thriller Stoppard wrote in 1986, was set at the tail end of the Cold War in its Lincoln Center revival. The title character, played by Stockard Channing, is a British spy trying to trap a “mole,” who may be twins. Talk of particle physics and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle seasons the convoluted plot.

While “Hapgood” grapples with dualities of personality and perception, “Arcadia” traffics in the duality of ideas: Newtonian order vs. chaos theory in physics, symmetry vs. the picturesque in landscape gardening, the Classic vs. the Romantic in literature.

The latter duality is personified by Blair Brown and Victor Garber as scholars researching events at a Derbyshire estate 190 years earlier. The play actually contains two different stories--the present-day investigation and the early 1800s events--that alternate and stalk each other until they merge at the end in a surprisingly touching manner.

Beneath all the contrasts explored in these plays lurks the age-old wrestling match between reason and emotion, though Stoppard will neither confirm or deny such an interpretation. He does concede, however, that “Hapgood” and “Arcadia” share with many of his plays an impulse to debate explanations for the way the world works.

Consider “Travesties” (1975), in which James Joyce, V.I. Lenin and Dadaist Tristan Tzara converge with conflicting intensities. Or “Jumpers” (1972) and its freewheeling inquiry into the nature of belief and morality. Even “Night and Day” (1977) offers conflicting views of how journalists do what they do.

“There’s definitely a kind of discourse going on in each, isn’t there?” Stoppard muses. “I think . . . the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.”

S toppard was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937. His family fled the Nazis and landed in Singapore, where his father, a doctor, was killed during World War II. (Tomas, his brother and mother had, by then, been evacuated to India.) After the war, his mother married Kenneth Stoppard, a British officer stationed in India. Eventually, the family settled in Bristol, England.

In 1954, Stoppard began his writing career with the local Western Daily Press. He was 17. Four years later, he became a feature writer and drama critic for the Bristol Evening World. In 1960, he left full-time newspapering to write drama and fiction, supporting himself with free-lance work.

Asked once why he chose playwriting in the early 1960s, Stoppard replied that it was what “everyone else was” doing in England at that time. This afternoon, he is asked to elaborate. Why plays and not, say, essays or philosophy?

“I think of myself as a theater animal instead of an intellectual animal,” he says. “I love the nuts and bolts, the whole mechanism of putting a play on with others.”

True, he writes “completely on my own,” mostly by dictating into a tape recorder and having it all transcribed. But when it reaches rehearsal, he says, “I’m a pushover for adjusting the play to suit the requirement of the moment. I find that part of the fun.”

As for the writing process itself, it’s enough to say that both “Arcadia” and “Hapgood” embrace random or chaotic theories of nature for good reason. Their author says that’s pretty much the way they came to be.

He had, for instance, been thinking about the dual nature of life “for some time” before finding a metaphor in the modern spy-story genre. Hence, “Hapgood.” He says the next plays he writes may be lurking around somewhere in the piles of books he regularly impulse-buys.

“With ‘Travesties’ . . . I’d just been reading a biography of James Joyce and found on page whatever that he’d been in Trieste at the same time as Lenin and Tzara. Hmmmm. In that instance, it’s like a chemical in a test tube, it starts bubbling and you can’t miss it, can you? When I buy say, 10 or 12 books at once and leave them alone, there’s no method or reason for them beyond thinking this is something interesting I’d like to read about sometime. Eventually, some of these books get into the plays in an intuitive, subconscious way, I suppose.” (Gardening books he’d bought years before he started writing “Arcadia” crept into that play in this manner.)

Stoppard wishes he could give more solid answers to queries about the how and why of his work, but he also believes life on all levels is too complex for solid answers.

“When I was in my 20s and 30s, there was this trend in England where one was constantly being stopped on the streets by people with clipboards . . . asking what I thought of this or that. And I was one of nature’s ‘don’t knows.’ I kept saying ‘I don’t know’ all the time because as soon as I formed an opinion about something, I could too easily see how some other person could contradict it. So I would always end up in this pathetic no-man’s-land.”

Many of Stoppard’s harshest critics, in fact, have laid into his plays for engaging too freewheelingly in point-counterpoint without resolution. They acknowledge Stoppard’s dramaturgical gifts while saying, as Robert Brustein wrote in a 1980 New Republic review of “Night and Day,” that he has used such gifts “in the service of a shell game. . . . His plays frequently toy with difficult subjects, but they are essentially not very serious conceits.”

Of this and other criticism suggesting that he’s too glib, trivial or evasive, Stoppard says, “I think it’s perhaps less true than it once was. . . . But that’s not to say I think it’s a step in the right direction or the wrong direction. . . . I never tried to . . . well. . . . No writer can make a program for himself or herself. I think you are what you write and you’re stuck with that.

“So it’s a policy decision, I suppose. It’s my temperament expressed in plays. And,” he laughs a little, “my temperament might be a fixture of--I was going to say, frivolousness, but it’s not quite that. I think what it’s nearer to is . . . an embarrassed seriousness .”