The Midwest premiere of Tom Stoppard’s final masterwork, Leopoldstadt, directed at Writers Theatre by his longtime collaborator, Carey Perloff, may be the best production of any play in Chicago this year.
Spanning the first half of the twentieth century in Austria, the multigenerational play follows the falling fortunes of two Jewish families from 1899 through the aftermath of World War II, culminating with one of the few surviving members reckoning with the fact that he lived a life of blissful near-ignorance in England, thanks to a British journalist who married his mother just before they would have been sent to the camps.
That character is loosely based on Stoppard himself, and the play represents his exploration of and reconnection with his Jewish roots along with the attendant survivor’s guilt and self-reproach.
In addition to a Tony Award-winning play that crackles with brilliant dialogue, vividly imagined characters and a deeply affecting story that reminds us that Never Again will never be assured, this production is aided by Perloff’s stellar direction a year after she worked with Stoppard to complete the final revisions of this version, and by a Murder’s Row of fine Chicago actors at the top of their game, including Ian Barford, Kate Fry, Sean Fortunato and Joey Slotnick.
The largest production Writers Theatre has ever staged spares no expense with its expansive cast, along with Ken MacDonald’s elegant set and Alex Jaeger’s exquisite costume design.
In the last scene, set in 1955, three survivors gather in the Vienna apartment where it all started. There, they sift through the wreckage and explore what remains of their familial bonds. Leo (Sam Bell-Gurwitz) faces the dawning horror of what he escaped in forging his comfortable life as a writer in England. Nathan (Justin Albinder), who played cat’s cradle with Leo in this apartment when they were both small, survived the camps and has returned to a still virulently antisemitic Austria to make a place for himself in a bitter act of defiance. Rosa (Jessie Fisher) is visiting from America, where she built a successful career as a Freudian analyst after securing a U.S. visa in the 1920s.
As these three come to agree on the importance of keeping alive the memories of those who did not survive and of the unspeakable crimes committed against them, they draw the audience into the same compact. Stoppard strips away the cruel abstraction of the Holocaust by giving us more than two dozen compelling, complicated characters and showing us the terrible cost borne by all of them.
It’s breathtaking.
Leopoldstadt runs through Aug. 16 at Writers Theatre.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Michael Brosilow
