Welton Jones - SanDiego.com

What a rich stew of literary hi-jinks Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" is! And how cleverly Sean Murray has brought it to the stage of his Cygnet Theatre, despite the dense structure of the piece.

Murray is always up for a good, stiff intellectual canter through the mists of European History - mid-20th Century physics in "Copenhagen," the closeted gay poet A. E. Housman in Stoppard's "The Invention of Love" - but "Arcadia" is special, a breathless eye-witness report of the tectonic shift when Romanticism smothered the Age of Reason.

Stoppard uses the same flavorings as A.S. Byatt employed in her essential novel "Possession" (if you enjoyed "Arcadia" and don't know "Possession," go RIGHT out and etc.) but his intentions move beyond a mere masterpiece of a literary thriller.

Byatt invented the geniuses in her story, whereas Stoppard piles his characters around the feet of the premiere superstar of the era, George Lord Byron. Though Stoppard leaves him offstage, Byron dominates the plot, if not the soul, of Arcadia.

The scene is a remote English estate in 1809, where Byron happens to be visiting. But, funnily enough, he's not the one who is romping his way through the female hearts and beds. That's his friend, one Septimus Hodge, the brilliant, mildly roguish tutor to the precocious 13-year-old daughter of the house.

A couple of hundred years later - same drawing room, same furniture, same family several generations later - a scavenging academic free-booter from the Oxbridge Set shows up determined to track down the source of three mysterious letters long ago tucked into an obscure volume from Byron's library. This fellow has it all wrong, as we know from watching what REALLY happened, but there's no stopping him from publishing his version, or from crashing and burning later when some of the real truth emerges.

Stoppard juggles the two-century time shifts with the practiced virtuosity of a master dramatist but that?s not the point of the play. That's mainly just fun, with a few nasty digs at academic swagger thrown in from somebody who probably has endured more than his share of same.

What's really important, is the math scribbling of that girl, Thomasina. Under the guidance of Septimus Hodge, she has puzzled out the beginning of - if I understand correctly - the second law of thermodynamics. (Stoppard sums the law up with his usual elegance: "We'll all end up at from temperature.")

She was decades ahead of the field - the tutor struggles to understand her logic, as does the modern mathematician trying to extrapolate from the brief document - but she might have found major fame and jumped science a century ahead if the proof hadn't been so impossible. As in years of truly boring calculations, the sort of thing this is now done is moments on a computer.

But the girl really would rather talk about love and learning to waltz and maybe being introduced to Lord Byron. Oh, YES, agrees the enraptured audience, but it is not to be. Thermodynamics will eventually be tamed but Thomasina will disappear forever into the grinder of prosaic, everyday history. And the key details of the tutor's love life are lost too, though just enough remains to puncture the pompous fool.

Actors will follow Sean Murray anywhere and this cast of polished veterans and doughty newcomers is no exception, even if several of them are miscast.

Rosina Reynolds as a modern author of best-sellers and Jason Connors as the family math wonk are very gingerly paired off romantically but absolutely no sparks transpire, just hard-working decency. Claudio Raygoza, though thoroughly unlikely as a dog with the women, is game for the course as the maraudering scholar. And Kate Reynolds, while vague on the details of her 20th Century post-deb, still projects a feral vitality.

The key roles get nailed, however. Rachel VanWormer is a force of nature as Thomasina, a hummingbird that wants to suck at EVERY blossom. Sometimes there are just too many words and she goes shrill and garbled but there never is any doubt about her presence and her hunger for life. And Matt Biedel plays the tutor as if Shakespeare collaborated on the authorship to create a man anybody in any era would be proud to have as the nurturer of genius. These two smolder with intelligence, purpose and sensuality even when they're discussing Latin verbs.

The 1809 folks, in fact, are each and every one more of a success that our contemporaries: Glynn Bedington as an aristocrat of full appetite, David Radford as a sniveling third-rate poet, Jim Chovick doing a most juicy butler, Bryan Curtiss White and Michael C. Burgess as fringe swells. The only actor doing duty in both centuries is young Zev Lerner, about whom there can be few quibbles. The quibble concerns the 13th listed cast member, a tortoise. Played by a plaster model?!

Murray often designs his own sets and this one is a model of efficiency plagued with cheesy detailing: too-tiny alabaster busts, metal filigree on the furniture. Eric Lotze, who can make the Cygnet lights do just about anything, provides on this occasion just enough magic to make the two-century split thing more than just a gimmick.

Jeanne Reith dresses everybody beautifully and with satisfactory authenticity except - nit-picker than I am - I wonder about the naval officer. If he is indeed a Royal Navy captain, he needs to lose the trouser stripes and gain a couple of epaulettes. It's a period, regrettably perhaps, with a look visually familiar today.

I suggest audiences relax with this show, take time to read the chatty glossary (but not the spoiler synopsis!) and let the erudition flow. Two quotes (perhaps misquoted; I have no script.) indicate what I mean.

"At universities they teach rhetoric like P.E."

And, summing up... "It's wanting to know that counts."