Language and Love

“Arcadia” is a great play not because it seamlessly meshes serious ideas and the intense pleasure of a literary detective story. It is a great play because, by the end, Tom Stoppard touches ineffability, just as his heroine touches genius.

The action cuts between 1809 and the present, all of it taking place in one room at Sidley Park, a beautiful country estate in Derbyshire. This is where Lady Croom’s brilliant young daughter, Thomasina (Angela Bettis), has her lessons and where she is nonchalantly discovering thermodynamics and chaos theory in her homework doodles. In the 1990s, this is where a couple of rival scholars are doing their research, in a house now owned by descendants of the formidable Lady Croom. As the present-day characters attempt to decipher the past, Stoppard examines--using more than physics--the nature of time, and how it reaches forward and back to touch us with mysterious force.

Under the direction of Robert Egan, “Arcadia” (1993) unfolds some of its glory at the Mark Taper Forum, where it opened Thursday night. The director must be held responsible, though, for one glaring error: John Vickery’s island-of-his-own performance, which sets a new standard for scenery chewers in serious plays. Vickery employs an apparently bottomless trunk of facial contortions, vocal gymnastics and hand-wringing to play the arrogant Bernard Nightingale, and it may take 20 minutes to figure out if it’s Vickery or Nightingale who’s annoying. Nightingale is doing research on Byron, who visited Sidley Park. Viciously competitive, he is out to undermine any scoops being unearthed by Hannah Jarvis (Kate Burton), who’s studying the garden of the estate.

As Hannah, Burton has a no-nonsense demeanor that manages to offset Vickery, like a cool drink after an overpowering taste. Her character’s encounter with Nightingale improves her scholarship. Soon she is on the trail of a story that goes very deep into the mystery of Sidley Park.

By cross-cutting between centuries in the same room, we become engaged in the real story behind the scholarship, and we see not only how literary detective work hits and misses it mark, but how the past and the future speak to each other in hidden ways.

Hannah’s research begins to focus on Septimus Hodge (Douglas Weston), tutor to Thomasina, who oversees his student’s extraordinary calculations with a watchful but not entirely comprehending eye. Septimus is one of Stoppard’s greatest characters. He is a young, casual Romeo, yet in his care of Thomasina we sense a rare sensitivity. Their relationship, filled with wonderfully fresh discussion of philosophy, science, is as delightful an unknowing courtship as was ever written for the stage.

When Thomasina tearfully imagines the treasures lost at the library at Alexandria, Septimus comforts her with a wonderful speech about how great things are never lost. It is a speech very close to the heart of the play, which makes us feel both what is lost and what is mysteriously retained of human matter, of the things that can and can’t be preserved on paper.

In the glorious role of Thomasina, Bettis gives a performance reminiscent of Nicole Kidman’s Isabelle Archer in “Portrait of a Lady”: She’s enchanting, but one remains unconvinced of her character’s brilliance. In the first act she strains, vocally and emotionally, for naturalness. She blossoms in the second, though, which takes Thomasina breathtakingly close to womanhood, a moment the play memorializes, achieving what the scholars can only clumsily attempt.

Thomasina’s existence is the reason for the title, a place or moment of exquisiteness, one that is all too perishable and yet always with us. It’s a very potent metaphor, which Stoppard manipulates with incredible skill. He is helped by David Jenkins’ set, capturing the classical loveliness of the room at Sidley Park, and by Kevin Rigdon’s lighting, which shows, through the French doors, a perfect periwinkle light that is essentially unchanging, whatever the time of day.

As Chloe, an upper-class twit who Nightingale seduces, Suzanne Cryer, who was so good at playing a smart climber in Donald Margulies’ “Collected Stories” at South Coast Repertory last fall, overplays her character’s stupidity here. Weston is a solid Septimus; his understated reactions to Thomasina’s findings are invaluable to understanding the play. But he’s missing an extra patina of effortless charm that Septimus should have.

A raven-haired Kandis Chappell is splendid as Lady Croom; she emits a dangerous combination of breeding, power, education, wit, and entirely too much time and freedom. Her suggestive second-act scene with Septimus is sublime. As a 19th century fop, Mark Capri gives a cartoonish performance that is kept in check and perspective. Daniel Zelman is impressively cogent as Valentine, whose job it is to explain a lot of the physics to us.

The play closes with a breathtaking scene, a visual poem on the connectedness of love and suffering and awakening across the void of a century. Stoppard is known for his remarkable facility with words, but “Arcadia” demonstrates the difference between wordplay that inspires admiration and the kind that goes beyond language, all the way to the human heart.

* “Arcadia,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 23. $29-$37. (213) 628-2772. Running time: 3 hours.

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“Arcadia,”

Angela Bettis: Thomasina Coverly

Douglas Weston: Septimus Hodge

Jefrey Alan Chandler: Jellaby

Mark Capri: Ezra Chater

Howard Shangraw: Richard Noakes

Kandis Chappell: Lady Croom

David Manis: Captain Brice

Kate Burton: Hannah Jarvis

Suzanne Cryer: Chloe Coverly

John Vickery: Bernard Nightingale

Daniel Zelman: Valentine Coverly

Christopher Masterson: Gus Coverly/Augustus Coverly

A Mark Taper Forum production. By Tom Stoppard. Directed by Robert Egan. Sets David Jenkins. Costumes Marianna Elliott. Lights Kevin Rigdon. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Hair and wigs Carol F. Doran. Composer Nathan Birnbaum. Production stage manager Mary Michele Miner.