Watching Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is bound to make you feel smarter.

This 1993 play, a career highlight for the playwright, is a complex interweaving of past and present, of intellect and emotion, of science, history and art. It’s a dense, challenging work, but also an infinitely entertaining one that offers vast rewards.

Its classical elegance is well displayed in the sterling new Broadway revival that was previously seen in London’s West End a couple of seasons back.

Set in a stately home in Derbyshire, the play’s action alternates between 1809 and the present day. In the scenes set in the 19th century, the characters are striving to make scientific advances, while in the ones set in the present they are looking to uncover the secrets of the past.

We are thus privy to extended conversations about such topics as landscape gardening, Fermat’s Last Theorem and the intricacies of Newtonian physics and chaos theory.

If it all sounds dauntingly challenging, then you underestimate the playwright’s gift for rendering intellectual concepts in wonderfully entertaining fashion.

It certainly helps that the play contains some of Stoppard’s most colorful and memorable characters, including Thomasina Coverly (Bel Powley), a teenage math prodigy; Septimus Hodge (Tom Riley), her dreamboat tutor; Hannah Jarvis (Lia Williams), a no-nonsense academic researcher; and Bernard Nightingale (Billy Crudup), a hilariously enthusiastic historian who is determined to prove his theory that Lord Byron, who briefly stayed in the house in 1809, fled the country after killing a rival poet in a duel over an adulterous affair.

Director David Leveaux has provided a production that is simultaneously stately and breezy, one that conveys both the poetic poignancy and playful humor of the work. He’s also assembled a terrific ensemble, including three holdovers from the London production--Powley (who has an unfortunate tendency to swallow her words), Riley and Williams.

Crudup is endlessly amusing as the historian; Raul Esparza is terrifically droll as the family scion with a particular fondness for both mathematics and his pet turtle; and Grace Gummer, Meryl Streep’s daughter, demonstrates that she’s inherited both her mother’s stunning beauty and talent. The cast is further rounded out by such reliable theater veterans as Margaret Colin and Bryon Jennings in smaller roles.

Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200. www.Telecharge.com.