"Leopoldstadt" at Longacre Theatre

Production photo by Joan Marcus

 Show number two for this trip is the reason we came at all: Tom Stoppard's latest play, Leopoldstadt, is on Broadway for a limited engagement, and we wanted to make sure we saw it. The other six plays this week are just a bonus. Suffice it to say that a new Stoppard play (and for all we know, this could be the last one) is reason to go out of your way to the theater. So here we are in New York City.

The Play

This is probably Stoppard's most personal play. Having read his biography this past year, I know that over the last couple of decades he has been coming to grips with his sort of hidden family history. He's always known that he and his mother and brother are Czech, and fled their homeland ahead of the Nazis, but apparently it never registered with him that they did so because they were Jewish. So Stoppard assimilated into his adopted country with his new name, and no one ever really talked much about the past.

Leopoldstadt is the story of an extended, prosperous Jewish family in Vienna from 1899 through 1955. With varying degrees of assimilation and intermarriage, the characters discuss (often at great length--this is a Stoppard play) and illustrate what it means to be Jewish, even when they are trying not to be. Needless to say, as time passes through two world wars (and especially the second), it becomes increasingly difficult to escape other peoples' insistence that one is Jewish, even if one has tried to leave it behind.

It's a huge play. There are thirty-eight actors involved, and the show runs over two hours (with no intermission in this production). It can be a bit overwhelming.

And in the end, after the wars, after the death camps, the few remaining family members meet up in Vienna, and the young man who escaped with his mother and stepfather to England has to come to grips with his own past and the stories of the family he doesn't really remember.

It's a very powerful piece of writing. It doesn't have all the wit and word play that we've come to expect from Stoppard (although it's very definitely a Stoppard play--don't get me wrong!), but the characters are rich and interesting, even when there are so many of them that it can be hard to keep track. It's a good, good play, and solidly impactful.

The Production

I have enormous respect for any production of this scale that manages to be comprehensible at all. The sheer size of the cast and the chaos of the opening scene (a family Christmas gathering in 1899) is impressive, but we get a real feel for what life is like.

And the rest of the play takes place in this same room, in this same house (with only a couple of small scenes played outside it) as time passes. The characters age (and die), more are born, and the family home forms the center around which the rest of the world revolves.

The cast is strong. I won't call out any individuals, though there are some who probably deserve it. Suffice it to say that everyone who needs a good performance gets one, and the multitudes of supporting players do their parts fine. Director Patrick Marber does a terrific job of keeping the flow going--the show never drags, though it runs over two hours without an intermission.

The final scene does an amazing job of tying the threads of the story together (and reconnecting the now-English Leonard with his Viennese origins as Leopold). As his other surviving relatives recount the fates of those who didn't make it, you can see the weight dropping on Leo, and feel the weight of all the lost relatives.

So yes, it's a Holocaust story, but it's also very much a personal journey for all the members of the family, and both the script and the production do justice to all the various members of the family--the Jews, the Christians, the converts, the intermarried, the ex-patriots--all coming to terms with what it means to be Jewish, whether in their own eyes or in the eyes of those who decide for them.

It's a powerful and remarkably subtle rendering of a huge and often horrific story, never losing sight of the sweet and personal aspects.

Bottom Line

It's really quite different from most Stoppard plays. If you're expecting the banter of a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or the verbal and emotional gymnastics of The Real Thing or Arcadia, you won't find it here. But there is tremendous writing craft and stagecraft involved in this story, and true insight into the playwright's own journey. It is two hours very well spent.

The show is scheduled to run through March 12, 2023. Go see it. Really. It's worth the trip to New York.