In today's issue of 7 I talk with Michael Peterson about his new production of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" presented by Artists' Repertory Theatre. Here's a continuation of the interview:

What drew you to this play?

I loved the play from the first time I read it. At that time the only Stoppard work which I was familiar with was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which had been produced at the college I attended (Occidental). When I came across a copy of Arcadia upstairs at Theatre3, I read it, and its amazing juxtapostioning of poetry and math fascinated me immediately. Also, the fact that one of the characters is supposed to have attended the same English university (Sussex) where I did a junior year exchange, was personally engaging as well. I urged Gordon Goede to produce the play at Theatre3, but he was never interested in it. Now, since the formation of Artists' Repertory Theatre, I've gotten the exciting opportunity to direct it myself.

"Arcadia" is set in two different times. Can you explain?

The action of the play all happens in one room, but alternates scene by scene between events and dialogue occurring among characters set in the early 1800s (Regency period England) and other characters set in the modern day who are trying to figure out exactly what happened during the earlier time setting.

How as a director do you bounce back and forth between the time periods? Do you want your actors to be "modern" in the appropriate places?

There are essentially two separate casts, who I tend to refer to as The Regents and The Moderns. During rehearsals, some nights I would work only with one group or the other, some nights we would all get together for a full run of all scenes. In terms of directing methodology, I did not exactly plan it this way, but the work with the Regents has taken on a rather traditionally structured flow in terms of blocking and oral interpretation work, while the Moderns have fallen into a more "organic" approach to the process.

Tell me about your cast.

As previously mentioned there are basically two separate casts. The Regents are played by myself, my lovely and talented wife, Jennifer, a long time theatre associate of ours going back to the halcyon days of Theatre3, Luis Ramentas, the incredibly funny and extremely hirsute Ricci Mazzuca, the brilliantly erudite Justin Red, the fastest memorizer in show business, Mary Piona, and our charming ingenue, Lisi Drioni. The Moderns are made up of the phenomenally radiant Kate McKnight-Wippern, whom many will recognize from her recent tenure with Second Space and F.C.C., the smolderingly passionate Suzanne Garcia, the busiest and most versatile actor in Fresno, Adam Meredith, and the dashingly handsome Sebastian Ardemagni. The cast is rounded out with introduction of Omeid Heidarii who plays roles in both casts to great comedic effect.

How does the show's production design figure into your director's concept?

The playing space will set up in a form of "theatre in the round," with audience members seated on all four sides of a basically rhomboid or diamond shaped area where the action takes place. The dimensions of this area are determined according to the Pythagorean theorem and its relationship to right triangles, which is obliquely referred to in the play during a discussion of Fermat's Last Theorem.

Why do you think Stoppard chose to set the play in 1809-12? Was there anything special about that period in history?

Historically speaking, the Regency period was time of great intellectual and political turmoil in Europe. In England it is defined as the transitional period between the Georgian and the Victorian eras. Napoleon was wreaking havoc on the continent, the intelligentsia was debating the ideas of the great enlightenment, distinctive movements in architecture, literature and fashion were established. And, oh, by the way, here in the States, we were involved in a war of our own.

How does math figure into "Arcadia"?

In the Regency setting, the young girl Thomasina cuts quite the figure of a preternatural mathematical genius. She claims to have solved Fermat's Last Theorem, which states that a number A raised to any power other than 2, added to another number B, raised to the same power, can never equal a third number C, again raised to the same power. It does work for powers of 2, as Pythagoras showed (A squared plus B squared equals C squared), but it doesn't seem to work for any thing else. The mathematician Fermat famously claimed to have discovered a "marvelous proof" of why it would never work, but the margin of his book was too narrow to contain it, so he never wrote it down and he died soon after. Algebra fanatics have been vexed ever since with trying to discover this unrecorded mathematical gem.

Additionally, Thomasina is disappointed by the limitations of Euclidean geometry and its lack of ability to approximate the real forms of nature (as opposed to simple curves), so she sets out to develop a "new geometry of irregular forms" which it turns out, in the Modern setting, is exactly what we today call "fractals". These are mathematical shapes described by a process of recursive iteration or feedback, putting the solution to an algorithm back in again, to create the next value and so on. The patterns which result are not only visually amazing (look up Mandelbrot Set on the Internet) but are very mathematically useful for describing any chaotic phenomena such as weather patterns, coastlines, population dynamics, and even the stock market. They're pretty, too. I put one on our poster.

Do you worry that a play like this will be too intellectually dense for audiences?

The play can be enjoyed on any of many different levels. The straightforward story of romance and betrayal and maybe a duel is exciting for its own sake. The humorous wordplay will be entertaining to those who are so inclined. The play's specific references to real-life figures in the history of math, science, poetry, and even landscape architecture will delight aficionados of any of these fields.

Do you recommend that people read a synopsis of the play or critical essays about its themes before seeing the show? Or should they go in cold?

I suppose that's up to the individual viewer. As this is a well known play which has been often examined in great critical detail there is wealth of information available about its various themes and ideas via the internet. For the sake of easy reference, I have also taken the liberty of compiling a list of many of the less familiar words, phrases, and personages which appear in the play. I affectionately call it "The Wikarcadia" and it can also be accessed at www.myspace.com/ARTFresno along with a sample of Byron's poetry which is read aloud (though, alas, not by the author himself) and some groovy examples of animated fractal art.

I've read that one of the themes in "Arcadia" is chaos theory vs. determinism. I assume that means that on one side, there's a belief that life unfolds randomly, and on the other that every event is determined in a long chain of occurrences. What does the play have to say philosophically about this issue?

The play does indeed explore this dichotomy in some detail. In one scene the handsome tutor Septimus Hodge phrases the debate in terms of the question of "free will." At another point, he cleverly mocks the "determination" of the young and headstrong Augustus.

For the last 400 years or so philosophers and theologians have argued the point in various forms. If God is indeed omniscient then he knows in detail all that has happened and all that ever will. If he does indeed know all this then he knows what I am going to do and what I am going to choose at every moment of every day from this moment until I die, and perhaps even beyond. And if he knows in advance what I am going to do and choose, how can it be logically said that I choose freely. How can there be "free will" if the result is known ahead of time? That my subjective experience is one of choices which are freely made begs the question of whether or not God is in fact omniscient. Or taking the question to it's logical extreme, whether in fact he exists at all.

We can safely conclude by the end of the play that author stands firmly in the court of free will.

What do YOU think? Has directing this play changed any of your own personal philosophies?

I personally was raised from childhood in the Presbyterian church and did not confront these issues until sometime in my teenage years. By then my "faith" was evolving from a childish naivete through phases of shaky questioning, confusion and agnosticism to a final certitude in scientific materialism and atheism. I now look to the world and the universe around me and wonder at it's marvels, but I have a clear and simple non-mystical understanding of how it, they and I all came to be here. I apply a version of Occam's razor (named for William of Occam, who is not referred to in the play) which basically states that all things being equal, the simplest explanation is probably the most correct. Or as I believe Werner Heisenberg once remarked, "God? I have no need of that hypothesis."

Here's a line from the show: "We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it." How do you interpret this?

I think this is a statement of Stoppard's existential attitude combined perhaps with a bit of Darwinian sociology. Each of our individual lives is brief in it's scope and we can each only hope to carry the burden of human culture and development a little way further down the long path of sociological growth and improvement. We each leave a few things, like inventions, theatrical plays or mathematical theories, in our wake for others to utilize, ponder and enjoy. They in turn are offered an opportunity to contribute in kind. To paraphrase Newton, only by standing on the shoulders of giants are we able to see so far as we do. Or to extend another metaphor, together we weave the complex tapestry of human culture, as each individual thread of life begins at a point somewhere within the cloth and ends at a point somewhere further down the warp and weft. Outside the fabric, outside the march, outside our lives, there is nothing. There is no afterlife of heavenly reward or hellish punishment. There is only what we make of our short tenure here on earth. All our actions, all our choices, exist here within the tapestry of life itself and not beyond. For some, it's nice or even personally necessary to imagine a cosmic weaver pulling the strings, but for myself and I believe for Stoppard as well, the more challenging perspective is to take responsibility for oneself, to realize that each of us is in the end only exactly what we make of ourselves. We carry on as best we can. Let your colors shine brightly while they may and gather ye rosebuds along the way.

What do you hope audiences walk away from this show with?

I hope this show challenges people. I think it will. It not any easy play, but I think it's a play that Fresno is ready for. I hope that it provokes discussion and dialogue and argument and all the wonderful things that make us human.