Through April 24.
A few sour-faced begrudgers apart, everybody loves Tom Stoppard, and rightly so. No matter what the man writes about, his work is brainy but not pompous, sweet but not precious, gutsy but not overbearing. Arcadia is no exception, though it's framed in a provincial English obsession I just don't give a damn about--the parallels between the lives and loves of contemporary British literary historians and their merrie olde ancestors. But this is Stoppard, so along with landed gentry fetishism, we get 12 subplots, eight romances, and lessons in algebra, rationalism, physics, landscape architecture, and Lord Byron.

Two generations--one current, one pre-Victorian--haunt an English estate, each equally interested in natural philosophy, literature, and getting it on. As the moderns try to follow the paper trails of their forerunners, often getting the past laughably wrong, they stumble on a series of mysteries, including a teenage girl who discovered the science of fractals nearly 100 years before her time. The play of ideas is fierce, but the play of eros is fiercer and more enduring. Whether we live in a universe modeled by Aristotle, Newton, or Mandelbrot, the laws of genital friction are always more imminent than those of thermodynamics.

The story is great (and the set is well done) but the production is as uneven as a closed-eyed shave. The moderns are 10 times more interesting than their 19th-century counterparts, thanks largely to the vigor and chemistry of the dueling academics played by Amy Frazier and Charles Leggett, who sloshes buckets of presence all over the theater. The rest of the cast seems anemic and awkward by comparison. They hesitate and stumble, never really taking Stoppard up on his offer to get the lead out and be as smart, passionate, and interesting as he seems to think we are. BRENDAN KILEY

Edmond

Open Circle Theater

Through April 25.
There's something of John Milton in David Mamet, and this tense and stark work possesses all the lyrical lilt and timbre of an epic poem cum snuff film. The title character in Edmond (Lyam White) is a disillusioned-by-life, not-so-young suit-and-tie guy who willfully abandons his intolerable life and intolerable wife (Karen Gruber) to systematically, horribly bottom out in every way imaginable.

Yes, in that way too.

By way of this smart, painfully intimate staging, the audience is dragged on an emotionally numbing but sickly fascinating journey through the lowest sleaze-caked cesspits of mankind's worst imaginings: desperation, addiction, alienation, insanity, murder, emotional/physical/spiritual imprisonment, outrageously priced hookers--the whole depressing, downwardly spiraling enchilada.

This dark and demanding production is well served by thoughtful technical work and austere staging that simply, deftly, and inescapably evoke the desperate, steaming streets of jaded mid-'80s New York City, and allow for very few and very quick scene changes--important for an emotionally demanding, intermissionless 75-minute show. Strong performances by each member of this excellent-seeming cast of thousands (11 players total, most tackling several rolls) and the obvious care and attention to detail keep this kamikaze train on track. In between urges to shower off my soul, abscond from the human race, and take a prolonged nervous breakdown, I think I loved it. ADRIAN RYAN

Fools

Taproot Theatre

Through May 1.
Fools is an extra-G-rated, community-oriented, even-the-damn-Mormons-couldn't-find-a-problem-with-it type romp through total fluff--the kind of theater that the kiddies and the old folks (barring the one in the front row with the apparent case of narcolepsy the time I went) eat up with their respective spoons.

Don't hate me if I thought it was adorable, too.

This Neil Simonized version of a Ukrainian fable concerns a remote and seemingly idyllic mountain village called Kulyenchikov, which for two centuries has labored under an ancestral curse that renders every citizen dumber than a rock of boxes. Yet (tada!) there is hope on the stupid horizon, for the curse can be lifted if the new schoolmaster--bright as a fistful of pennies, über-eager, and played with amiable exactitude by Bob Borwick--can somehow pound the square peg of knowledge into the little round head of a dazzling Kulyenchikovian gal called Sophia (Kelly Balch). The wit is suitably rapacious (in a completely above-the-waist sort of way) and indelibly infectious: Basically, the eye-rolling corn comes so fast and furious it's almost impossible not to succumb to the silly, silly cuteness of it all. So wake up, narcoleptic old man! There's a darling little show going on here. ADRIAN RYAN

On Stage