Leopoldstadt, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Harman Hall, Washington, DC

 


The cast of Leopoldstadt at Shakespeare Theatre Company. Photo credit: Teresa Castracane.

Sir Tom Stoppard may well be the most awarded and one of the most often-produced playwrights of the past 60 years, since bursting upon the scene in 1967 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He is the most honored playwright in Broadway history, having won the Tony Award for Best Play a record five times, including for this play in 2023. Leopoldstadt may be the crowning achievement of his career. He has said that it is perhaps his final play (he is now 87 years old) and in some ways, it is his most personal.

Leopoldstadt is a sweeping epic regarding four generations of a Jewish family in Vienna, which at the turn of the 19th to 20th century may well have been the cultural center of western civilization, fostering achievement in literature, music, poetry, and philosophy, in addition to the advent of psychoanalysis. The play takes its title from the “Jewish ghetto” of Vienna, in which the family eventually finds itself isolated. We begin in 1899 and continue with episodes in 1900, 1924, 1938, and 1955.

The first half of the play takes place in 1899 and 1900. The families gather for their first Christmas celebration, a sign of their (at least partial) assimilation into the Viennese culture. Descended from Jewish tradesmen who emigrated from Russia, several of the second and third generations have married into and/or converted to Christianity, perhaps more for business purposes than as declarations of faith. They appear to be thriving in Vienna, considering themselves as more Viennese than Jewish and apparently being accepted in Viennese society as such. Two of the more prominent characters are brothers-in-law Hermann, who manages the family’s textile business (and has converted to Catholicism), and Ludwig, a professor of mathematics who is obsessed with the concept of Riemann’s Hypothesis, which attempts to find patterns in the distribution of prime numbers.

The cast of Leopoldstadt. Photo credit: Teresa Castracane.

The play’s program includes a family tree identifying the members of the various generations, including which are Jewish and which are Christian, which is helpful. Even so, it is challenging to keep so many different characters straight, particularly as we move from one scene to the next, with actors then playing the descendants of characters they may have played in previous scenes. It scarcely matters, though, since the tapestry of so many different characters in such an array gives us keen insight into the generations as time progresses.

After the scenes set in 1899 and 1900, we skip ahead to 1924. One of the boys from the first scenes who wanted to become a soldier has died during the Great War (in which Austria-Hungary was allied with Germany and was defeated by the Allies); another, Jacob, assumed to be the son of Hermann and his wife Gretel (we find out differently later on), served in the war and has lost an eye and the use of an arm.

We next see a somewhat-diminished (and much less affluent) family in 1938, the year in which Germany annexed what was Austria. At this point, we realize that no matter how assimilated the Jews have felt, their fellow Austrians – not the Germans – would never consider them as anything other than Jews. Nazis enter the property to inform the family that the building has been requisitioned by the Nazis and they must leave, tomorrow. Hermann must sign over control of the family business to the Nazis, though it was not his to surrender, since ownership had transferred to Jacob. We then learn that Jacob was a product of a liaison between his mother Gretl, a Christian, and a young dragoon with whom she had an affair: he is a Gentile and therefore, we assume, is not subject to Nazi prohibitions of Jews having a business.

Finally, in 1955, the only three members of the family to survive the Holocaust are gathered in the family home. Leo, who was able to escape to England as a child, has only the vaguest memory of his life there, is joined by Rosa, who moved to New York before the Holocaust, and Nathan, the only one to return to Vienna (as a mathematics professor like his great uncle Ludwig) after surviving Auschwitz. Rosa recounts what happened to the various family members. Some were suicides, a few are described as having died in Dachau, but for the majority, their fates were described in one word: Auschwitz.

The play’s program informs us that Stoppard himself was born in what was then Czechoslovakia the year before the Nazis’ annexation and escaped to be brought up as British, never knowing of his Jewish identity until meeting a Czech cousin in 1993. Leopoldstadt is the story of a fictional family Stoppard may have had and never known. It is an innately personal play, which he would (or could) not write while his mother was alive.


The cast of Leopoldstadt. Photo credit: Teresa Castracane.

The play, co-presented with The Huntington Company of Boston, receives a sumptuous physical production. Ken MacDonald has designed a set that glows with elegance and tradition, especially under Robert Wierzel’s lighting design. Yuki Izumihara’s projection designs mark the changes in period with intriguing black-and-white images of the periods. (The contrast between the projections and the color-filled set are striking.) Alex Jaeger’s costumes reflect the opulence and splendor of the turn-of-the-century Christmas celebration as well as the more somber days of subsequent years, complemented by Tom Watson’s hair and wig design. The sound design and original music by Jane Shaw draw us into the action and mark the passage of time.

Carey Perloff directs the play, coordinating all of the technical elements with the finely-polished work of a sizeable cast. (The program lists 23 cast members, including two understudies.) Perloff challenges the actors (and the audience) with unexpected staging, for example, staging one confrontation between characters atop what had been the extended dining table in the first scene.

All of the performances are first-rate. Nael Nacer is all-business and slyly manipulative as businessman Hermann, with Brenda Meaney flirtatious and playfully sensuous as his wife, the free-spirited Gretl. Firdous Bamji creates an intriguing character as mathematician Ludwig, who shows flashes of brilliance as well as absent-mindedness. Samuel Adams is a sensual Fritz, who then becomes steely in his ruthless dealings with Hermann, and later is earnest and empathetic as Nellie’s British fiancé Percy. Samuel Douglas exemplifies the cruelty and evil of the Nazi oppressor as a German official ordering the family out of their home. Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, who made an outstanding impression in the 2023 Shakespeare Theatre Company’s presentation of the Tectonic Theatre Project’s Here There Are Blueberries, delivers another strong performance as Ernst, a doctor and another brother-in-law to Hermann and Ludwig.

Just as with Here There Are Blueberries (https://theatregoerthoughts.blogspot.com/2023/05/here-there-are-blueberries-shakespeare.html), it is apparent that we need periodic reminders of some of the horrors of the last century, especially in these politically-charged times. The day I saw Leopoldstadt, I read an article online about the recently increasing number of antisemitic incidents in nearby Montgomery County, Maryland. The day after, a case of arson at a synagogue in Melbourne, Australia made headlines, demonstrating that the issue is not just an American problem. Reports from a number of news outlets indicate that antisemitic incidents rose to record levels in the U. S. in the year since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, while earlier in 2023, before the Hamas attack and the war in Gaza, increases in antisemitic incidents were recorded in France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, and Mexico. The messages of Leopoldstadt may be timelier now than ever.

Leopoldstadt continues at Sidney Harman Hall through December 29.


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