Emily's Musings

Arcadia

Tina and I went to a superb production of Arcadia, one of my favorite plays of all time, tonight at Theater Works in Mountain View. Wow. Its just so amazing its hard to explain... Its about chaos theory and math and love and time and gardens and hermits and an amazing amount of stuff squished into funny and very smart dialog. You get Fermat's Last Theorem, Lord Byron, the Picturesque and the Sublime, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and learn to waltz. Even though I had seen it before and had even read the play, there was so much I didn't remember and the staging still gave me goose bumps when the characters in early nineteenth century and the modern day occupy the stage together and look over the same documents. And of course when I put the ending clues back together as they unfolded I almost cried!

Some quotes:

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write a formula for all the future: and although nobody can be so cleaver to do it, the formula must exist just if one could ( Thomasina to Septimus )

"We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it."
(Septimus to Thomasina)