News-Letter

Media Credit: Angeli Bueno Junior Carol Santoro and sophomore Rob Keleher are part of an ensemble cast in the Barnstormers' production of the Stoppard play.

The JHU Barnstormers, the University's oldest and largest theatrical troupe on campus, successfully put on Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, one of the most esteemed playwrights and screenwriters of our day.

Like Stoppard's more famous 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which takes a whole new approach to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Arcadia is not a "feel-good" play that one can simply sit back, relax and enjoy. Arcadia, Stoppard's later play from 1993, is filled with witty dialogue, complex characters and plotlines, surprising twists and revelations and a stark message about the fate of mankind.

The cast of Arcadia should be complimented for their superb acting, aside from the fact that some characters were better at consistently maintaining British accents than others, while the director Nancy Murray and the rest of the crew should be proud of their collective ability to bring such a complicated play to life.

Arcadia, named for the Utopian idea in Greek mythology of living in harmony with nature, takes place at Sidley Park an historic home of aristocrats. The scenes switch back and forth between focusing on the inhabitants of the house from 1809 to 1812 during the Regency period in England and the residents in the house during 1989, although at the end, past and present converge.

The play starts in the past where Thomasina Coverly, played enthusiastically by junior Toni Del Sorbo, precociously asks her tutor Septimus Hodge (senior Bill Fuller) about rumors she has heard in the house about carnal embrace. At first, she claims she could never understand the workings of the world including mathematics and human sexuality without his help. Amid the tension between Septimus and Ezra Chater (freshman Michael Van Maele) over literature and Septimus's affair with Chater's wife, between Thomasina's mother, Lady Croom (graduate student Karen Manna), and the gardener, Mrs. Noakes (sophomore Rebecca McGivney), and between different combinations of these characters and others, it becomes apparent that Thomasina is no ordinary girl. She contemplates Newtonian physics, the second law of thermodynamics, mathematical calculations and the philosophy of determinism at such a young age and way before her time.

Continued...

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