Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia has been called one of the most “powerful and relevant stories of our age” (The Guardian). The play’s many elements include Byron versus science, the Enlightenment versus the Romantics, pure reason versus sheer randomness — and, says one character, “It’s all because of sex, the attraction that Newton left out.”

A visit to Sidley Park is never for naught. In Potomac Theatre Project (PTP/NYC)’s light-on-its feet production of Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece, Arcadia, the play proves as timeless as ever; there’s perhaps no greater testament to the work’s themes. Split between the early 19th century and the turn of the millennium, Arcadia tracks the intrigues and discoveries of the residents and visitors of a country estate in Derbyshire. From 1809 to 1812, supervised by her tutor, Septimus Hodge (Andrew William Smith), the young Thomasina Coverly (a spritely Caitlin Duffy) advances a precocious–and anachronistic–theory of entropy derived from a cup of rice pudding. Meanwhile in the 20th century, professor of literature Bernard Nightingale (Alex Draper) spars with author Hannah Jarvis (Stephanie Janssen) over a possible new chapter in the life of Lord Byron. Through marginalia, mundane records of the house, and a good bit of recovered scratch paper, the truth of Hannah’s subject, the hermit of Sidley Park, is revealed while the action of academics in both eras reveals the fundamental truth–how little people and their passions change. The parallels follow in Stoppard’s suggested staging, ma …Read more