Having just built themselves a stately home, the folks at Writers Theatre are christening it with a play set in one. Tom Stoppard’s 1993 Arcadia takes place in a study at Sidley Park, an English estate that’s housed members, guests, and servants of the Coverly clan for at least 200 years. Michael Halberstam’s staging of Arcadia, meanwhile, unfolds at the new Writers Theater complex in downtown Glencoe, designed on a multimillion-dollar budget by Jeanne Gang’s Studio Gang Architects.
Everything Thomasina is so curious about becomes history in the very next scene, when a couple of modern-day literary researchers invade the same room she sat in so many years earlier. Hannah Jarvis is occupied with landscaping changes that took place at Sidley Park during Thomasina’s adolescence, believing that the transition from ordered gardens to a Gothic faux wildness reflects the decline of Enlightenment rationality into Romantic fuzzy-mindedness. She’s particularly interested in the identity of a hermit who’s said to have lived in a faux hermitage amid the faux wildness, with only a tortoise for company. Alcoholic, egotistical Sussex don Bernard Nightingale shows up looking for proof—or, failing that, a gut feeling—that Lord Byron spent time on the estate, and may even have fought a duel there.
Through 5/1: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, Tue 7:30 PM Writers Theatre 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe 847-242-6000,writerstheatre.org $60-$80
