SOURCE: "Stoppard Comedy Bridges Centuries and States of Mind," in The New York Times, March 31, 1995, pp. B1, B10.

[For many years the chief film critic of The New York Times, Canby is also a novelist, playwright, and theater critic. In the following excerpt, he favorably reviews Arcadia.]

There's no doubt about it. Arcadia is Tom Stoppard's richest, most ravishing comedy to date, a play of wit, intellect, language, brio and, new for him, emotion. It's like a dream of levitation: you're instantaneously aloft, soaring, banking, doing loop-the-loops and then, when you think you're about to plummet to earth, swooping to a gentle touchdown of not easily described sweetness and sorrow.

That's the play.

Trevor Nunn's Lincoln Center Theater production, which opened last night in the Beaumont, is a reasonable American facsimile of those he staged in London, first at the Royal National in 1993, then at the Haymarket in...