Arcadia

What do fractal geometry, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, iterated algorithms, chaos theory, classical horticulture, gothic architecture, carnal embrace, and Lord Byron’s sex life have in common? They are all ingredients in Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece comedy thriller Arcadia, the final UW Drama production of the 2009-2010 season.

But you won’t need a higher degree in nano computing or quantum mechanics to have a good time with this play.  Arcadia is emphatically not a dramatized academic seminar, but a tightly executed theatrical tour de force which is part satire, part detective-story, part debate about determinism and free will, part celebration of the ungovernable curiosity about the world around us.

Considered by many one of the greatest plays of our time, Arcadia celebrates the human thirst for knowledge fully cognizant that such knowledge will forever be elusive.  Yet in the pursuit of sexy ideas about the universe it also celebrates universal ideas about sex, the one unpredictable “attraction which Newton left out” in his deterministic model of the world.