I went this evening to see the revival of Arcadia on Broadway with J. We’d seen the original together, in 1995, at the tender age of ___, on a theater spree. That Billy Crudup was in the first, playing the rakish juvenile lead, and is now playing the older, self-aggrandizing academic, well. Aging, we’re all doing it!
(Though, what is up with shows from sixteen years ago all being revived, and now? In addition to Arcadia, there is Master Class, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (the Matthew Broderick version was of that time), all of which were on the Great White Way in nineteen-hundred-and-ninety-five. Can someone connect the dots?)
I was hoping that I’d be able to recall more of the the original I’d seen, to make trenchant comparisons betwixt the two, but no. Too much time has passed, and my memory has never been that reliably durable. I tried to conjure up Blair Brown and Victor Garber, but could only manifest traces of their ghostly presence on the stage.
This current production—and granted it is unfair to compare it against its predecessor even as an exercise in memory—is lacking, in certain areas. It felt too amped up, and manic, in pitch. Like, I found Thomasina to be too spastic, and while the rapport between Crudup (now in the Garber role), Raul Esparza, and Lia Williams was enjoyable, there was something too chummy in the proceedings, as if they enjoyed each others’ performances so much that they were unwilling to to jab or sting, and were also intent on spiking everything over the net, adrenalized, that there were no moments of earnest ache. I think J. said, at intermission, that they seemed as if they’d all consumed too many cups of too-strong coffee.
It may be the fault of casting, skewing younger, that made some of the dictates of the script less believable. I recall before buying that Blair Brown seemed an age wherein she might have permanently hung a closed sign over her lady business, but I did not buy that Williams, in the same role of Hannah Jarvis, would not submit to a tumble with Esparza’s Valentine Coverly, even as a one-off. But this might be again the trick of memory, having perceived Brown as impossibly older to my __-teen year old self.
It was also confounding, and minorly creepy, that the actress playing Thomasina didn’t find a way—however slight—to differentiate her precocious character at age thirteen from age seventeen, so her flirtation/waltz/kiss with her tutor Septimus at the end of the play put too much of a burden on his role, and it felt less like the realization of a woman in bloom than an exercise in abstaining from lechery. Septimus Hodge, as played by Tom Riley, seemed to be the only one who managed to articulate and embody the right rhythms of the piece, managing to fill his moments and silences without a manic eagerness to please.
But then, re-reading the Times review of the first Broadway production, it mirrors the concerns of the current one, and perhaps the gloss of memory has made that original experience too golden. As with Shakespeare’s works, it is likely there never has nor never will be a perfect version of this play performed, and that is not a terrible thing.
Like a great piece of music, even if the conductor occasionally errs, the purity of the work endures, and so I often found myself closing my eyes and investing in the language of the script, shutting out moments of stiff staging and whirling missteps. (I had a similar experience, a few years back, with the fairly maligned production of The Glass Menagerie starring Jessica Lange, and also helmed by David Leveaux it is worth noting. It was tonally creaky at points, but, like, I felt privileged to attend a Williams play revived on Broadway, in the age of jukebox musicals and theatrical adaptations of mediocre films.) As J. said, it is a treat to hear these words performed, by consummate professionals, despite the occasional bum note. Maybe that is the difference that comes with age, a willingness to overlook the minor faults, without a huffy dismissal, since the greater message of the play is one to embrace, and savor? Like in life certain themes overlap, not always in the way we envision, or hope, but in a way that leaves us desirous of more. The alternative being no kind of life at all.
