Arcadia at Court Theatre

A really, really enjoyable production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia at the Court Theatre.

From Chris Jones's Tribune review:

"The heady complexities of Tom Stoppard -- a playwright whose allusions contain allusions to allusions -- have been amply noted. But even though his writing shows unusual political neutrality, he's among the greatest living playwrights because of the passion of his characters. Once a Stoppardian person unleashes the meaning of the universe, it's like an over-articulate revolutionary at the barricades. When done right, you get smacked right in the chops.

Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia," which recently finished its run at New York City's Lincoln Center, has that riveting, hopelessly impassioned quality. And so does director Charles Newell's provocatively assertive revival of "Arcadia" at Chicago's Court Theatre. Even as Stoppard's characters -- the pursued from the early 19th Century and the pursuers from the late 20th -- yak on about gardens, Newtonian physics, Lord Byron, mathematics and sex, the ever-smart Newell gives you the sense here that they're all a bunch of spluttering, well-dressed atomic particles whom he has dangerously unleashed on our world, much as Enrico Fermi and his nuclear crew once did in 1942, just a bit farther south on Ellis Avenue.

...

Smashing performances abound, including the suave Grant Goodman as the tutor Septimus Hodge and, especially, Erik Hellman as Valentine Coverly, that character's rough modern equivalent. Tortured, smart and weirdly emotional, Hellman offers a close-to-perfect performance. And Mary Beth Fisher (as a modern writer) and Bethany Caputo (as a prodigy from the past) offer stellar turns. Caputo really takes some risks and makes her choices work. In fact, the whole show works best in its boldest directorial moments, which makes you think it could have gone even further."