Pam Kragen - North County Times

In 1999, Sean Murray's production of "Arcadia" at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach topped every local critic's top-10 list. Murray's magical and accessible production of Tom Stoppard's brilliant but complex play was both stimulating and entertaining.

Eight years later, Murray has taken another crack at "Arcadia" at his own theater, Cygnet Theatre in San Diego, and the results are even better. A bigger production budget, a more consistent cast and Murray's own growth as an artist inform the play in new ways ---- in particular the heart-tugging poignancy of the bittersweet final scene.

Like all of Stoppard's plays, "Arcadia" is a swirling mix of romance, science, literature, philosophy and humor that compels the audience member to sit up and pay attention to the fast-paced dialogue. "Arcadia" also has the added plus of being a brain-teasing mystery whose final clues aren't revealed until the final moments.

In ancient Greece, poets had a name for the elusive garden where love and peace coexisted in perfect harmony with nature ---- Arcadia. And it's the tryst-filled gardens of an English country estate that concern many of the characters in Stoppard's "Arcadia." The play is the story of two separate but linked stories that unfold nearly 200 years apart in the same sitting room of the Coverly estate in Derbyshire.

As the play opens in 1809, we meet Thomasina Coverly, a 14-year-old math whiz who unexpectedly stumbles upon the second law of thermodynamics (more than a hundred years before anyone else) when her witty-but-bored tutor, Septimus Hodge, asks her to prove the long-unsolved geometric equation known as Fermat's Last Theorem.

The new discovery, which Thomasina equates to the wasted energy in the noisy steam engine digging trenches in the Coverly gardens, holds that entropy in a closed system is always increasing. The orderliness of the universe is increasingly random, and all matter will eventually grow cold and die. Each equation has its variable (Thomasina also discovers the "chaos theory" more than a century early), and in this play, the variable that inserts randomness into the best-planned equation is love.

Thomasina adores Septimus, but he pines for her mother, Lady Croom, and he also unapologetically beds the promiscuous wife of a dreadful local writer Ezra Chater. Meanwhile, Lady Croom is romancing the famed poet Lord Byron in the gardens, where landscape architects are busy transforming the classical topiary, fountains and temples into wildly romantic and chaotic ruins that typified the era. Three years later, it is a random act of adolescent infatuation that will unexpectedly crush Thomasina's brilliance and leave it buried in the ashes of history, only to be picked up and discovered again, nearly two centuries later.

In the play's second story ---- which plays out with the first in alternating (and occasionally overlapping) scenes ---- we meet the modern-day descendants of the Coverlys and two visiting historians who hope to uncover the long-buried secrets of the estate's past. Valentine Coverly, a brainy mathematician, is trying to prove iterated algorithms in the estate's grouse population using his Apple laptop and old game-hunting books found in the family library. His reluctant fiancee, Hannah Jarvis, is also doing research, studying the landscaping history at Coverly as a metaphor for the struggle between classicism and romanticism, and trying to uncover the identity of the hermit who lived in the Coverly gardens until his death in the 1830s. And there's Bernard Nightingale, a pompous Lord Byron expert who hopes to solve the riddle of why Byron left England (never to return) in 1809. He believes Byron fled after a fatal gun duel with the cuckolded writer Chater, and hopes to find his answers in the books, notes and records left behind long ago by Thomasina, Septimus and Byron.

Although the play suffers from too many long-winded speeches on fractals, iterations and Newtonian physics, there's great fun in seeing how far off-base these modern sleuths are in their historic theories. The play's 1800s scenes are more interesting than the modern-day scenes, but fortunately superb actors are cast in the roles of Hannah and Bernard, so the entertainment value is well balanced.??Murray's cast is exceptionally strong.

Rachael Vanwormer plays Thomasina with noisy, energetic precociousness (her consistent English accent is spot-on throughout, though she never appears to age during the three years her story travels). Matt Biedel is perfection as the handsome, bright and wistful Septimus, who's in awe of Thomasina's genius but ever so gently resists her youthful crush (with unexpectedly tragic results).

Claudio Raygoza steals all of his scenes in a delightfully wicked performance as the outrageously vain and openly ambitious Bernard Nightingale. His wild comic leaps are balanced by Rosina Reynolds' understated but meticulous performance as the landscape author Hannah. Also terrific is David Radford as the ridiculously dim and blustering Ezra Chater.

Glynn Bedington is buoyant and clever as the much-admired Lady Croom, and Jim Chovick makes the most out of the small role of Jellaby (Lady Croom's nosy servant). Jason Conners has the nerdy nobleman down cold, but he's decades too young to be a romantic match for Reynolds' Hannah. Filling out the cast in smaller roles are Kate Reynolds, Brian Curtiss White, Michael C. Burgess and Zev Lerner.

Murray's direction of the time-traveling story is seamless, imaginative and peppy (the play feels much shorter than its three-hour running time), and he also designed the simple but classic interior study set. Eric Lotze's lighting is especially evocative in painting the dreamy cloudscape outside the study's windows. Jeanne Reith's rich costumes easily set the time and place for each story. George Ye designed the sound, James Vasquez choreographed the waltzes, Peter Herman designed the wigs and hair, and Alberto Escalante served as assistant director.

Like all Stoppard plays, it pays to arrive a bit early to read the helpful program notes on the scientific, cultural, literary and botanical history of Thomasina's time. And a little caffeine won't hurt, either, to sharpen the senses for all the witty wordplay Stoppard is famous for. "Arcadia" is one of Stoppard's most enjoyable plays, and Murray proves himself once again as a more-than-worthy interpreter of Stoppard's work.