By Cynthia Citron

From the way that Tom Stoppard uses the English language, you'd never guess that his first language was Czech.  Born in 1937 to a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia, Tom Straussler and his parents fled the Nazis all the way to Singapore, where his father was killed.  After a short stint in India, his stepfather, Kenneth Stoppard, a British army major, brought the family to England. And from the age of nine, the budding British playwright began to grow a vocabulary that might stop William F. Buckley in his tracks.

In "Arcadia," his 1993 play about morals and hunches and convictions, Tom Stoppard takes great delight in leading us down the garden path.  And a maundering, meandering path it is.  Full of truths and trivia, conjecture, confusion, and complexity.  It's wordy, and witty, and a little wonderful, and the Vox Humana crew at the Century City Playhouse in Los Angeles makes it almost comprehensible.

The initial scene takes place in a time of change, as exemplified by the garden at Sidley Place. It's the early years of the 19th century, and the lady of the estate is having her garden updated from the formal, geometric design of the conventional English landscape to the new, natural wilderness that teases the imagination with a gothic mysteriousness.  The gardener has produced an elaborate visual plan that incorporates a small cottage, or "hermitage" on the grounds, to which Lady Croom (Katharine Phillips Moser)'s precocious daughter, Thomasina, has whimsically added a live-in hermit.

The next scene reveals an alternate universe.  It is the present time, and a horde of researchers have invaded Sidley Place.  Hannah Jarvis (played by Naomi DeLucca) is a popular author preparing a book on historic English gardens.  Bernard Nightingale (Mark Salamon) is a pompous academic seeking to prove his theory that the poet Byron had visited the site in 1809 and had killed one of the other guests in a duel.  And Valentine Coverly (Matt Bennett) is working on the ramifications of a mathematical theory that his ancestor Thomasina had intuited and developed.

Thomasina, (charmingly played by Carlita Penaherrera) is 13 when the story begins.   A passionate and irresistible young lady, she is being tutored by Septimus Hodge (Brian Silverman), a bright young man who is smart enough to recognize that his pupil is far more brilliant than he. And also far more innocent.  So, even as he parries her questions (when she asks what a "carnal embrace" is, he tells her it refers to "throwing your arms around a cow"), he encourages her intellect.  They discuss mathematics, theoretical physics, literature, the Library at Alexandria. When she laments the loss of the Library and its literary treasures he reassures her that "everything written, everything invented, will be written and invented again."  Sort of like the monkeys and the typewriters and Shakespeare.

This theme will be picked up in the scenes set in the present, as Valentine explains such esoterica as Fermal's last theorem, relativity, quantum mechanics, and the second law of thermodynamics to Hannah Jarvis.  Interesting, understandable (at least for the moment), but excessively wordy.

As the plot thickens in each of the time frames, the subplots digress into farce.  For this, Stoppard introduces at least half a dozen characters who seem to have wandered in from an entirely different play.  It's almost as if Stoppard recognized that he had taken on some industrial strength subjects and felt that he needed to bring in some comic relief.  Unfortunately, this ploy doesn't always work; the superfluous characters are more distracting than illuminating.

In the end, however, most of the mysteries introduced in the 19th century are solved in the 20th. Except, of course, the identity of the mysterious hermit in the garden.

Lisa Guzman, a founding member of the Vox Humana troupe, has directed this production with verve and vigor.  She has put set designer Alana Schmidt's all-purpose workroom to effective use.  But the Tony belongs to D. Ewing Woodruff for his magnificent period costumes.  They add spice and validity to the 19th century proceedings.

Arcadia is said to be Stoppard's masterpiece.  I don't know about that.  His plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Travesties and The Real Thing.  His screenplays include Shakespeare in Love, for which he won an Oscar.  Perhaps he should venture into a new medium.  Arcadia would make a world-class opera.  Oh, where is Puccini when we need him most? Or Hugo Weisgall?

 Arcadia will run through April 10th at the Century City Playhouse, 10508 West Pico Blvd., Los Angeles