ERAS, WORLDVIEWS SLAM TOGETHER IN STOPPARD'S BRAINY `ARCADIA'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

There's a familiar saying that life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.

Playwright Tom Stoppard didn't coin that expression, but it might as well be stamped on the forehead of ``Arcadia,'' his very brainy new comedy having its West Coast premiere at the Mark Taper Forum.

In ``Arcadia,'' an elegant play of ideas disguised as a bedroom romp, thinking is constantly at odds with feeling. Logic, beauty, truth and enlightenment are forever being undercut by good old-fashioned lust, jealousy, ambition and pride. When ``Arcadia's'' characters aren't puzzling the mysteries of the cosmos or grappling with the riddle of existence, they're likely to be dropping their knickers, slamming doors or tripping over their own follies.

Has it ever been otherwise in homo-sapien affairs?

Splitting time between two centuries, ``Arcadia'' alternately unwinds in the garden room of Sidley Park, a large country manor in Derbyshire, England, circa 1809, and in the very same house some 200 years later, in the 1990s. Several of Sidley Park's 20th-century inhabitants are the descendants of its 19th-century blue-blood owners.

For most of the play these worlds remain separate, gradually bleeding together as the two groups of characters converge through time toward a strange mutual destiny. ``Arcadia'' investigates what happens when dreams and desires, science and art, past and present, male and female, are hurled together across space and generations, like isotopes in an atom smasher. Suffice it to say that when these worlds collide, sparks fly - with great flashes of bawdy humor and volcanic eruptions of Stoppardian wit and wordplay.

Sexual tension supplies the fuel that makes ``Arcadia'' go round. Chiefly, there's the unconsummated passion between a handsome young tutor named Septimus Hodge (Douglas Weston) and his 16-year-old female pupil, Thomasina (Angela Bettis). Precocious both in mind and spirit, Thomasina is a budding genius, equally capable of discerning her elders' darkest secrets or of spotting the flaws in Newton's model of an orderly universe.

Add to this mixture the lusty Lady Croom (Kandis Chappel), and a jealous second-rate poet (Mark Capri) determined to restore his honor with dueling pistols, and you have the makings of a fine thinking-person's farce.

Now flash-forward to the present day. We are still in the garden room at Sidley Park, only the struggle has shifted to a literary big-game hunt pitting a bullying academic (John Vickery) against a no-nonsense novelist (Kate Burton). He's hot to prove a connection between Sidley Park and the late Romantic poet Lord Byron, while she's investigating the connection between the death of Classical landscape architecture and the onset of the Gothic worldview.

What's the upshot of all this erudite ego-butting and highbrow hanky-panky? A densely packed, exhilaratingly written philosopher's chapbook of a play, which some critics on both sides of the Atlantic believe is the Czech-born author's best work. You may well agree.

Because it deals so fundamentally with the war between head and heart, ``Arcadia'' requires a tricky trade-off between clever ideas and gut-level gags, between Stoppard's donnish speculations and the metaphysical clowning for which he's both celebrated and, occasionally, faulted.

Taper producing director Robert Egan has chosen to stress the play's comic high jinks over its cerebral charms, turning up the heat on Sidley Park's hot-and-bothered denizens. Compared to the Broadway version of the show, temperatures run a degree or two higher; decibel levels have been cranked up to afford maximum mirth.

This approach keeps the bodies in lively motion, all right, but it also means that some earnest repartee gets converted into overheated debate. The 11-member cast has a fine time firing off snappy comebacks (Weston and Burton are the standouts). What gets lost is some of Stoppard's cucumber-cool drollery and the aching poignancy of watching these misguided, often-confused characters grope their way toward the truth.

Still, by staying light on its feet, this ``Arcadia'' sweeps us along at a heady pace. In the end, you won't need to catch every allusion to Byronic verse or quantum physics, any more than you need to catch every last note in a Haydn string quartet. ``Arcadia'' tells us to look for the pattern, the big picture, the precious scraps and splashes that will outlive us all. However imperfectly glimpsed, it's riveting to behold.

THE FACTS

What: ``Arcadia.''

Where: Mark Taper Forum, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday; through Feb. 23.

Tickets: $29 to $37. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three Stars.