"Arcadia"
Tom Stoppard
Lakewood Theatre Company, March-April 2007
Photos by Lake Oswego Photographers,
courtesy of Lakewood Theatre Company
Tom Stoppard's rich and erudite play about literary history, scholarship, Newtonian versus Einsteinian cosmology, and the heat death of the universe received a fine staging at Lakewood Theatre Company in Lake Oswego.
I had a small role as landscape architect Richard Noakes (complete with a Scots dialect) -- who serves as a comic foil for regal Lady Croom. In the first half, seen here, I came on with armfuls of architectural drawings ... one of which I contrived to drop, and then had to retrieve, during a tense moment. In the second half, I got to wear a leather apron and carry a theodolite.
That's Ken Moore to the right of me in the photo, looking characteristically furious as Captain Brice. I had worked with Ken five months before in Morton Paglin's adapation of a Chekhov novella, "Three Years."
This production was memorable for the superb performances of Todd Van Voris as Bernard Nightingale, Paul Angelo as Septimus Hodge, Chelsie Kinney as Thomasina Coverly (that's Chelsie to the right, utterly befuddling me with her nimble wit; note also the theodolite cradled in my hand), Jamie Rea as Hannah Jarvis, and as Jennifer Hartman as Lady Croom.
WHAT THEY SAID
"Some of the actors don't seem to have climbed inside the lines yet, ... Still, the show's worth seeing, if only for the display of the famous Stoppard wit." -- Holly Johnson, the Oregonian, March 5, 2007
"With all of its intricacies, Arcadia is certainly not an easy play to pull off, but Lakewood Theatre manages with hardly a wrong step. Lakewood's production of Arcadia was intriguing before the play began: The set was absolutely flawless in design—furnished with just a table and chairs and a teacher's podium, it perfectly evoked a wood-paneled study in an old English manor. Similarly, the sparse lighting and sound cues were effective in their simplicity.... Lakewood Theatre has crafted an engaging and altogether enjoyable theater experience with Arcadia." -- Erin LaCour, Portland Mercury, March 22, 2007
"Tom Stoppard's extraordinarily funny and insightful comedy about love, literature and mathematics gets a lackluster treatment from veteran Portland director Keith Scales. With ... a cast whose English accents hover somewhere between comedy and pity, the Lakewood production's slow pacing and inscrutable directorial decisions ... make the three-hour running time seem much longer." -- Ben Waterhouse, Willamette Week, March 7, 2007