Card Ninja, Arcadia
(Posted Nov. 18, 2023) By Fern Siegel
In the world of performance art, Javier Jarquin has carved out a singular role. He is a card ninja — which, conveniently, is also the name of his show. Card Ninja, now off-Broadway at Stage 42, currently housing New Victory Theater productions, is a delight.
The premise is simple. Jarquin, who hails from New Zealand, grew up wanting to be a ninja, Japanese spy-warriors skilled in martial arts during the age of the samurai. As a youngster, Jarquin didn’t have access to swords or makibishi, small metal spikes to stop opponents, so he improvised. He used cards.
Eventually, his dexterity and clever tricks, from slicing vegetables to flicking cards the length of a theater, resulted in another calling: entertainer. Jarquin took his obsession on the road — across 28 countries to date — and audiences everywhere are grateful he did.
Card Ninja, which won Best Comedy at the Adelaide Fringe Weekly Awards, is a solid hour of family fun, thrilling kids and adults alike. But as Jarquin repeatedly notes: It’s not a magic show. His performance relies on charm, athletic ability and concentration to perfect a novel idea. Jarquin doesn’t do conventional card tricks. Instead, he relies on storytelling and audience participation, as well as a specific skill-set, to captivate a crowd.
Card Ninja boasts a wow factor. But the real fun is realizing how much Jarquin enjoys his artistry. And that enthusiasm is contagious.
For those in the mood for serious drama, playwright Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is now at the West End Theater.
Stoppard, lauded as an intellectual and challenging playwright, debuted Arcadia in London in 1993. It grapples with a host of serious subjects — from Newtonian law to metaphysics to architectural landscaping. And it takes place in two eras, at Sidley Park, a stately English home in 1809-1812, and the present, which means the 1990s. It posited the Age of Reason and later, the dangerous effects of romanticism.
And in both eras, it addresses how gifted women are often sidelined or dismissed by smug, arrogant men who long for fame, but deliver only rants and pontifications.
The Bedlam company has tackled its latest revival, but unlike previous incarnations, with disappointing results.
Arcadia opens in 1809 with Septimus, a tutor (Shaun Taylor-Corbett,) and his 13-year-old pupil Thomasina (Caroline Grogan) discussing her math equations. Turns out, the teenager has created algorithms centuries ahead of her time. She doesn’t have the technology — or enough paper — to prove her theory, but it’s there. Lady Croom, (Lisa Birnbaum) her mother, is upset that landscape architect Mr. Noakes (Jamie Smithson) wants to turn her carefully structured gardens into wild acreage. And poet Ezra Chater (Randolph Curtis Rand), a guest, is obsessed with his wife’s infidelities.
As one group of characters exits, 20th-century characters who live to interpret the past emerge. Hannah Jarvis (Zuzanna Szadkowski) and writing don Bernard Nightingale (Elan Zafir) are in a heated academic debate over whether Lord Byron stayed at Sidley Park and if he was responsible for Chater’s death. Of course, the latter is all supposition posited by Nightingale, who is more interested in his 15 minutes of fame than literary accuracy. Jarvis, a garden historian, is committed to proof and truth. Together, they demonstrate the limits of scholarship and the limitless hunger of those who pursue the past.
But what’s really unnerving, given such intense topics, is how uneven and odd the production becomes. Even if audiences don’t follow all the theorems — which are admittedly complex — there is real drama afoot.
That it fails to register is the fault of director Eric Tucker, who had the strange idea to substitute shouting and snorting for solid performances. Worse, for the second act, he inexplicably changes seating: The actors are now in the seat rows and the audience is sitting in white chairs on stage. There is no reason for the switch, nor is there any rationale for actors suddenly tossing everything from bottles to magazines to each other when both generations are in the same scene.
There are a few noteworthy performances, namely Szadkowski and Grogan. But this three-hour ordeal is just that. Stoppard deserves better.