In ‘Leopoldstadt,’ a Master of the Stage Confronts His Own Ghosts

“Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s most personal play, is also true to the playwright’s form. It features a lot of talking, a surfeit of ideas, and is unrepentantly highbrow. It tells the story of a Jew-ish family at Vienna — there are baptisms and mixed marriages aplenty — between 1899 and 1955. Years of dashed dreams and cataclysm, on view at the Longacre Theatre. Jewish dream merchants, many of them immigrants from the world “Leopoldstadt” resurrects over its more than two hours, were the makers of such Xanadus as Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Broadway. Rarely, though, has there been a work of the stage or the screen that is so obsessed with the Judenfrage: How can the Jew be inoculated against modernity’s poisoned chalice? Zionism, baptism, socialism, and Auschwitz are answers the play considers. Mr. Stoppard’s play, directed by Patrick Marber and produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, had its debut at Wyndham’s Theater at London in January 2020. London was where Mr. Stoppard came of age. It is where he became the star who penned such classics of the modern stage as “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Arcadia,” and “The Invention of Love.” Also on his ledger is the screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love.” Before there was Sir Tom Stoppard, there was Tomáš Sträussler, Jewish boy born in Czechoslovakia. His family fled to Singapore the day before the Nazis invaded. His father died, and his mother remarried a British officer. Mr. Stoppard was raised at Darjeeling, India, and then England. He never attended university. Reckoning with his past would come slowly. He told Maureen Dowd of the Times that he thought of himself as an “Anglo-Saxon.”Eventually, in conversation with cousins and trips to the Czech Republic, the ghosts came back, and “Leopoldstadt” is the product of that belated reckoning with his own blood. The protagonist is Hermann Merz, played by David Krumholtz, a baptized Jew married to a gentile woman. His success and its price are dream and nightmare both for his ancestors, who piously peddled in the Pale. The year is 1899, two years after another assimilated Viennese Jew, Theodor Herzl, convened the first Zionist Congress. The first act features a debate between Hermann and his brother-in-law Ludwig, a mathematician, over Herzl’s dream. Hermann scoffs “don’t fall for this Judenstaat idiocy. Do you want to do mathematics in the desert or in the city where Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven overlapped, and Brahms used to come to our house?”The Broadway Company ofLeopoldstadt. Photo Credit/Joan Marcus. Hermann rhapsodizes the Habsburg hope: “My grandfather wore a caftan, my father went to the opera in a top hat, and I have the singers to dinner.” With pride he notes how the Viennese Jews “literally worship culture.” Baptism is a small price to pay for entry into the Austrian “Promised Land.” Without his tribe, Hermann preens, Austria would be bereft of “banking, science, the law, the arts, literature, journalism.” If at this point Mr. Stoppard’s characters feel less like people with pulses than ideological positions with mouths, there is still something thrilling about seeing and hearing this vital Jewish conversation unspool on a sumptuously set Broadway stage, the haut-bourgeois living room decked out in all its stuffy splendor. As a whole, Richard Hudson’s set design conjures the intimacy of a Passover Seder and eventually, the curt brutality of dispossession.If “Leopoldstadt” is a tragedy, that is because the history that propels it is the stuff of lamentation. The play jumps to 1924, where a debate over whether a Merz child should be circumcised plays out against a world fraying at the edges. There are limbs lost to the war, dizzying inflation, socialist fervor, and the first stirrings of national socialism. Nobody talks of Vienna as the New Jerusalem. Hermann’s Yiddish accent resurfaces at the edges. Flash forward to 1938, and the Merzes, brought low by the rise of fascism, are huddled and cowering in that very room before a Nazi officer who takes pleasure in dismembering their possessions and pretensions. A young British journalist urges those who can to flee, but the family is broken and hobbled by age and infirmity, the accumulated inertia of misfortune. The scene is brutal to watch, an exercise in jackbooted cruelty. A stand-in for Mr. Stoppard makes an appearance in the play’s last scene, set in 1955. The surviving Merzes gather, their numbers culled by suicide — Hermann takes his own life after being forced to move to the ghetto built in the old Jewish quarter, which gives the play its name — and genocide. Those who stay at Vienna are shorn of illusions and hope merely to survive, and perhaps recoup the heirlooms that now adorn museums. Among the remnant is Leonard “Leo” Chamberlain, the son of the British officer and one of the Merz granddaughters, for whom, like Mr. Stoppared himself, the truth that Jews were made to “run naked to the gas with the guards shouting at them” can only be a rumor. Of course, he was born not Leo but Leopold, and on his hand he bears from childhood the scar of the jagged edge of a plate shattered by the Nazi officer on the Night of Broken Glass.To be a Jew in “Leopoldstadt” is unmitigated bad news, an identity to shed in good times and shun in bad ones. Mr. Stoppard’s play delivers little of the joy of Jewish life, and plenty of its travails. It is a serious and old-fashioned play, admirable in its refusal to universalize, in its adamantine insistence that Jewish pain of 1942 matters in 2022. In telling his own tale, Mr. Stoppard, a lion in winter, proves that he still can create work that bites.

In ‘Leopoldstadt,’ a Master of the Stage Confronts His Own Ghosts

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