Go See This: Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia at UMKC

UMKC’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia closes this Sunday, before our next issue goes to press. Because it’s a fine production of a play touched with greatness, we’re running a review here, now. Also, the review doesn’t mention lights or sound or costumes, which all were fine, because, Christ, have you ever tried to summarize Arcadia?

Just a year or so back, when UMKC’s Graduate Theatre Department often outdid the Repertory Theatre with which it shares a building, no theater event would get me worked up as much as the department’s annual visit of faintly notorious director Barry Kyle of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

These days, the Rep is at last boxing in its weight class, but a Kyle show remains an event, a rousing education not just for his grad students but for anyone who appreciates ambitious theater.

Taking on Arcadia, Tom Stoppard’s heady stab at a theory of everything, Kyle forgos his grand flourishes and instead contents himself with setting in motion a little galaxy. His cast circles about debating truth and beauty, thought and feeling, order and chaos, sometimes reckless and human but by the end waltzing along like the spheres of the ancients.

For all his daring and the relative lavishness of his productions, Kyle distinguishes this show by force and clarity of movement, by the way each stride or pause is a small revelation.