“And I know which way the wind is blowing” says the Player King in Tom Stoppard’s first play, “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead”, referring to both the political climate in Elsinore and Hamlet’s famous line: “I am but mad north-northwest.” “Operating on two levels, are we? How clever!” is Guildenstern’s reply and that line might serve as a template for all of this playwright’s subsequent work.

Double meanings abound in “Arcadia”, a mind-bending and time traveling adventure that has been given a fine and enthralling production at The Gamm Theatre. As ever with this playwright’s work, you will leave the theater thinking about the universe a little differently than you did when you entered.

Tom Stoppard’s famous literary legerdemain and mesmerizing metaphysical mind are very much at play here, and play is the operative word as this is, first and foremost, a hilarious comedy of grand ideas. Our play takes place in Sidley Park, England, the ancestral seat of the Coverly family but the action occurs over the span of two centuries, nimbly jumping in the midst of a scene from the beginning of the 19th century to the end of the 20th.

We meet two separate casts of characters, tied to each other sometimes by blood but more often by their deep concerns. And as we shift centuries, hopping back and forth, there are much weighty and frivolous matters to be addressed and among these are romantic entanglements, literary mysteries, mathematical theorems, the entropic properties of heat, the sheer meaning of meaning, a tortoise, how we think and how much we ultimately can know.

Now I know I manage to make all this sound dry as dust but playwright Stoppard is adept at making the esoteric highly entertaining and the masterful direction of Fred Sullivan, Jr. makes “Arcadia” absolutely enthralling. We are frankly rapt in the audience as a universe of infinite ideas unfolds before us and matters as dense as matter and as light as light bounce around the room like charged particles.
It does not hurt that the dialogue here is dazzling and sparkles with wit, there are, along with the double meanings and unseen parallels that span centuries, both double and triple entendres and this is quite often a laugh out loud hilarious play. But the glittering words of the playwright, as well as the actors who speak them, are helped immeasurably here by the direction of Mr. Sullivan who keeps the words and the action of this play ever focused, always urgent and specific.

Stoppard’s scintillating discourse and dialogue is delivered up with aplomb by an expert ensemble at The Gamm. At the outset, in 1809 or so, we encounter Septimus Hodge, tutor to young Thomasina Crowley, who, when asked by his charge what ‘carnal knowledge’ means, informs her blithely that it entails embracing various cuts of meat. He’s been cutting quite a figure and getting his mutton himself, embracing the wife of a thick-headed would-be Romantic poet behind his back in the gazebo, an action witnessed only by the servants, who of course tell the news to all concerned.

The scholarly young rake Hodge is played to perfection by Jeff Church; he seems born to the role and appears to be right out of a regency portrait, lanky, stalwart and possessing an aquiline nose, he’s got the looks, smarts and elocutionary chops to make this role his own, and that he does, expertly.

Grace Viveiros lives up to her name and fills the stage with just that quality: grace. She’s enlightened insouciance personified as Thomasina and is wonderful at portraying precisely what we need, an intellectually restless woman wise beyond both her years and times.

Sure of himself, and wholly unaware of what’s going on, Brandon Whitehead is a delight as a comically cuckolded husband. The matron of this household is played with a grand sense of self-assurance by Deb Martin, who plays here the sort of haughty personage who knows that she alone is right even when she’s absolutely wrong.

In the modern scenes Tony Estrella possesses a palpably smarmy aura (and don’t they all?) as literary critic Bernard Nightingale. As a counter-point to his cheek Jeanine Kane brings her assured and eminently able presence to the role of his rival Hannah Jarvis. Jesse Hinson is a shy, sly wonder as a reclusive genius, what astounds is that when he thinks onstage you can positively hear the thought.
It’s a big cast and many expert actors give their very best here in small roles that manage to create a complete picture of our surroundings, Richard Noble and Tom Gleadow are consummate professionals in this regard, “The best time to be alive” it is so mused in this play, is when “everything you thought you knew turned out to be wrong.” Questions, not easy answers, assure our place in the universe of wonders, and we are reminded, here in “Arcadia”, mere collection of atoms that we are, that “if knowledge ain’t self-knowledge then it ain’t worth much.” I’d like to think that one thinks differently about one’s self and one’s place in the universe, after seeing this show.

A mash up of time and the consequences of events is also very much at work in The Wilbury Group’s “Ui” (pronounced ‘oo-ey’) which combines Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” and two plays by Harold Pinter, “Party Time” and “New World Order.” And I truly wish I could say that I enjoyed this evening. Alas, no.
The problem was not with these three scripts (the Brecht play shows the rise to power of a “Gangster” Demagogue, the two Pinter plays depict life under a totalitarian regime) the three of which were all ‘mashed-up’, cut and spliced very well together with each other (ala Stoppard’s time jumping twixt two centuries in “Arcadia”).

Whether or not this all worked, I couldn’t tell as I couldn’t hear any of the words spoken, the lines from Brecht were all screamed, at times with funny voices and often into an unnecessary microphone for such a small room, while Pinter’s words were muttered glibly and blandly, muting the undertones of the man who wrote the some of the best dialogue for the theatre. There were some pointed and hallucinatory moments of creating a busy stage picture in a small space, all fun, but it didn’t add to each author’s words (which were always hard to hear) one damned iota though, and the actual intent and sinister undertones of these two great writers were decidedly lacking.

In an incredibly gratuitous moment the song “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” (not credited in the program), was warbled by Artuto Ui, supplementing actual Brecht with bad faux Brecht/Weill by A. L. Webber. That I found obvious and cheap. Alone among a big cast of real pros only David Tessier and Melissa Penick seemed to know what the heck they were doing.

But let us praise glorious and truly epic failure. That this idea worked great on paper but fell flat from bad execution says much about a young company willing to take big risks and that has already achieved bold greatness onstage. I applaud ‘em for their guts and achievements. But when you make Harold Pinter a bore, frankly, you’re doing something wrong. If you want to be truly transported in your seat as you watch a play, go see “Arcadia”.

“Arcadia” at the Gamm, “Ui” at Wilbury, see listings for details.