Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" recently closed at Lincoln Center, but it thrived on campus last week as the focus of the Freshmen Reading Project.
By combining physics, math and scandalous love affairs, the play examines philosophical and scientific mysteries of the universe and their effects on the human comedy spanning two centuries. With its action appearing on such a broad canvas and mixing the humanities and the sciences, the play was selected as the text for the Freshmen Reading Project's fifth year.
The Reading Project was designed to provide a shared intellectual experience that sets the tone for incoming students. Copies of "Arcadia" and faculty-written guides to the science, math and literature in the play were sent in July to the 2,350 members of the incoming class.
The Class of 1999 reported to residence halls on Sept. 2. The following day, they met with the deans of the four undergraduate schools: Arts & Sciences, Engineering and Applied Science, Nursing, and Wharton. The freshmen gathered in 130 groups of 15 to 20 participants to discuss the play with faculty and staff. Freshman Convocation with an address by Penn President Judith Rodin followed in Irvine Auditorium.
"'Arcadia' is a play about the intersection of two groups of people, separated in time by almost two centuries, but connected by blood, culture, science, mathematics, literature and even landscape into a common human situation," said Dr. Christopher Dennis, director of Penn's Academic Programs in Residence and a member of the text selection committee.
"As a text, the play offers us an opportunity to draw together a great range of the disciplines professed by our faculty, and in this way to address the members of the entering class across an extraordinarily broad horizon," Dr. Dennis explained. "We really want to encourage intellectual talks and exchanges. We assume the social interaction will happen without promoting, but we're giving people permission to interact intellectually with the people they'll be living with for a year."
"Arcadia" was selected by a committee that included faculty from various disciplines and members of the Student Council on Undergraduate Education. Before its final curtain fell at the Vivian Beaumont Theater on Aug. 27, the play had won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award as the best play of 1995. Drama critic Clive Barnes had called it "the best Broadway play for many, many a season."
Students will have another opportunity to ponder "Arcadia" when Mr. Stoppard visits Penn on Feb. 6-8, 1996, as part of the Steinberg Symposium. The Czechoslovakian native will meet with students and faculty to discuss "Arcadia" and other works.
Previous Freshmen Reading Project texts include Euripides' "The Bacchae," the autobiography "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave," Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus" and Alan Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams."