Closing Time in Arcadia >>

For some time, it had been a ritual of Ricky (my best friend) and I to visit Athens, GA. There, we would fire off rounds, view a theatrical play, and then discuss it afterwards over sampler beers at Copper Creek Brewery. To give you a background, Ricky is a true bohemian…gypsy to the core and full of existential angst. He reads Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus in addition to the Classical Greeks. So plays are his thing, while the guns are sort of my realm. Yet amber beer is universal.

Weekend after weekend, we would see diverse genres, from Elizabethan to modern, tragedy to comedy. We were roaming the streets of my nostalgic little city, drunk at Tate Center, passing the tobacconist, Wuxtry Music Store with all the obscure indy records in crummy isles, popping in at The Grille...the local greasy spoon, and smoking stogies. This was the nightlife of two unbeautiful losers tending to observe their lives as spectators washed by in a blur of orange municipal streetlamps and cold-knuckle fog.

One such play was deeply moving, since I tend to actually have a more high-brow sense of humor than most of my contemporaries, and that was “Arcadia,” by Tom Stoppard…the same guy who wrote “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.” But unlike Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” with Vladimir and Estragon flitting about their life in situational incomprehension, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, hapless to stop the predetermined events of their lives as they partake in witty banter, the characters in “Arcadia” are central and pendulous to the cogs of the plot development, but are powerless to stop their own intertia.

The setting takes place in two ages, being Victorian England and Modern Era England, oddly in the same room of the same estate/manor house, with the motley cast of characters in each age reminiscing and romanticizing about the past, present, future, and the mysteries of time itself, which were punctuated by the recurrent motifs of death, unrequited love, and things never meant to be. The humor and method of conveyance is subtle at times, winding through expressions exhorted by scholarly characters in an educated, upper-echelon society, using as means of conveyance geometry, fractals, probability, and cold rationalism, while juxtaposing those themes with romanticism, emotion, theology, art, and poetry…both elements of humanism vying for a supreme explanation of the strangeness discovered in the courses of human lives.  In the Platonic/Aristotelian sense, lines explain the hunches, pitting Lord Byron against Archimedes.

In retrospect, I cannot rank Arcadia too distinctly as a comedy or a tragedy, as the characters laughed sincerely under a black cloud of impending reality. The convoluted unravellings of logic spilled out into bawdy-yet-meaningful retorts, like a stand-up act in the Parthenon. Lovers glanced, sought meaning, furtively moved in the strictures of British society, and I sat spellbound as the rushing theme of time, relentless and unreasoning, loomed large and threatened to bring an end to things. And then there was the final realization of we humans as the merest flickers in time, at the mercy of a serendipitous universe that takes us without the courtesy of an explanation, and the poignant moments of meaning we can savor before all we know is swept away.

Yet as inconvenient facts upshoot and confessions arise, uncertainty brews as to whether their sundering as friends, lovers, and associates is relegated to destiny in a geometrically elegant universe, or if it was all capriciously tossed to chaos theory. Or do they both dance together in the void? Such beautiful lives.

……………………………………………………………….

...........................................

On April 25th, 2009, UGA Professor of Marketing George Zinkhan shot his wife Marie Bruce and friends Tom Tanner and Ben Teague, triggering a nationwide manhunt. Two of them were the lead characters in this moving performance, “Arcadia,” all members of Athens Town and Gown Players. This is their website’s statement:

The three people we lost yesterday were a part of the rich 56-year history of this theater and, more than that, were vital members of the Town and Gown family.

Ben Teague, loving husband of UGA's Dr. Fran Teague for more than 40 years, was not only a friend but also a father figure to all at the theater. One would be hard pressed to find a Town and Gowner who had not learned at least one life lesson from this wise and kind hearted man. His wife wishes to say, "Yesterday Ben was murdered, which is hard to comprehend and impossible to accept. It was a beautiful day, however, and he was in his favorite place with the people he loved." Ben was a translator of German, Russian and English.

Marie Bruce was the binding force that held the Town and Gown community together. Having worked with Town and Gown for over 20 years, at one time or another she served in every capacity at the theater, artistically and administratively, from leading lady to president of the board to chief cook and bottle washer. A local attorney, Marie was the mother of two young children.

A gentle presence, Tom Tanner breathed life into every corner of Town and Gown through his quiet diligence and astounding creativity - most would call him genius. Father of an equally amazing daughter, Tom would tell you that while he enjoyed his work as director of the Regional Dynamics Economic Modeling Laboratory at Clemson University, his heart lived and thrived in the theater.

Ben, Marie and Tom were a part of our family, and as painful as their loss is for us, we know it is even more painful for their families. We want to extend our deepest sympathy to their immediate family and close friends outside the theater community. There are no words we can use to adequately express our grief.

When I saw the three of you, I was thunderstruck at your talent, humility, and humanity…and I regret that your talents were so unduly snuffed. I cannot judge  whether this was chaos or the rational order of things, but in this case I opt for the former, suffice it to say. I pray to the Almighty you step past the threshold where all your deepest human yearnings will be sated. Farewell. >>