Theater Review: The first original American production of ‘Leopoldstadt’ at the Huntington

BOSTON – “We are moving all too quickly from living history to historical memory,” notes the website for the National Jewish Theater Foundation, which serves as an archive for over 950 Holocaust-pertinent plays. “Each day, survivors and the moral authority they represent leave this earth, [but] theater production has an immediacy that can make their recollection come alive again.”

Tom Stoppard’s new play – an epic drama about four generations of two intermarried, upper-middle class Jewish Viennese families, the Merzes and Jakoboviczes – will find a welcoming home in the archive.

“Leopoldstadt,” currently on stage at the Huntington Theatre, is very much a memory play that sets its focus on how these families’ living history of the past becomes the historical memory of the future, albeit compromised by assimilation, complicated by interfaith marriage and undermined by religious conversion. It is set into motion by societal complacency.

Early in the work, the Merz family matriarch (the magnificent Phyllis Kay) is looking through a family photo album. “Here’s a couple waving goodbye from the train, but who are they? No idea,” she says. “It’s like a second death, to lose your name in a family album.” The remainder of the play demonstrates the truth of this statement.

“Leopoldstadt” is very much a Holocaust story as well, although the huge ensemble of characters (there are 33, played by 23 extremely talented actors) is unaware that it is for most of the production, in much the same way that the characters in Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” have no idea that they exist in the middle of “Hamlet.” In fact, Hermann Merz (a proud but vulnerable creature as portrayed by Nael Nacer), who runs the family’s prosperous textile business in 1899, cannot imagine that such a thing would even be possible. “This is the promised land….We’re Austrians now,” he says to his confounded brother-in-law Ludwig (nicely played by Firdous Bamji) in the first of the nine scenes that constitute this play. “We wept by the waters of Babylon, but that’s gone, and everything after, expulsion, massacres, burnings, blood libels, gone like the Middle Ages.”

If only he knew that the title given the play in which he currently thrives foreshadows his family’s fate, for Leopoldstadt is the name of the Viennese district where, in the 17th century, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I expelled nearly 1,600 of its Jews with the popular support of the local non-Jewish population. In the 20th century, it will be the place where the Nazis exile or murder all but a few of its 180,000 Jews. The tragic irony in Hermann’s commentary makes for some powerful storytelling as the Holocaust dramatically unfolds.

And by the final scene, when the survivors try to make sense of the genocidal fallout of Kristallnacht (led by a riveting Rebecca Gibel as middle-aged Rosa), many of us in attendance will find ourselves similarly reflecting on our own precipitously pruned family trees.

“Leopoldstadt” received its world premiere production in London’s West End in 2020, where it won two Laurence Olivier Awards. In 2022, the play transferred to Broadway and won four Tony Awards, including Best Play. This Huntington production, directed by Carey Perloff, is the first original American production of the piece.

There will most certainly be others, for this play and this production of it are absolutely breathtaking.

The play was inspired by then-56-year-old Stoppard learning from a cousin the facts about his family’s Jewish heritage, the extent of their persecution in Czechoslovakia and the long list of relatives who were murdered in the concentration camps. He discovered that he was born Tomáš Sträussler and, in 1939 at the age of 18 months, took flight from the Nazis with his family. And so, this play is personal. Its mode of presentation – more realistically rendered here than in its London and New York stagings – is a departure from Stoppard’s intellectually esoteric and often absurdist tendencies.

Still, fans of the playwright and regular attendees at the Huntington – where Stoppard has been the playwright of choice, second only to Shakespeare and August Wilson – will be able to identify many of his signature stylings in “Leopoldstadt.” Despite the play’s tragic tendencies, for instance, it is filled with his trademark wit and humor during particularly inappropriate times. And because of its tragic tendencies, his remarkable verbal virtuosity is front and center.

Director Perloff’s three-decade working relationship with Stoppard has given her a keen eye for the playwright’s theatrical markers and timing. And her own family history – her mother was a Viennese refugee who fled the Nazis in March 1938 – has clearly allowed her to relate personally to this story. The result is a production that is an extremely moving, very humane journey through time. And unlike the London and Broadway productions, this two hour and 10-minute staging comes with an intermission. It is a welcome addition that allows audience members to scan the family tree inserted into the playbill after struggling to recall who is who.

The entire production takes place in the same Merz family living room in Vienna, designed by Ken MacDonald. Its epic size and great attention to detail – wainscoting, delicate stenciling, and an inset bookcase decorating the walls, rich dark wood furnishings with a period chandelier hanging above it, a portrait of Hermann’s wife, Gretl (a gorgeous performance from Brenda Meaney) hanging in the rear – match the epic and detailed nature of the play taking place within it.

The home decays over time, an effect accentuated by Robert Wierzel’s dramatic lighting, Alex Jaeger’s remarkable costuming, and Tom Watson’s wig and makeup design. And the progression of time is powerfully punctuated by Yuki Izumihara’s animated projections and Jane Shaw’s soundscape at the start of each new decade.

Autofiction like “Leopoldstadt,” whose theatrical narratives are built from historical truths, was referred to as “testimony’s ambitious sister” by the late South African Nobel Peace Prize recipient Desmond Tutu in regard to his nation’s own apartheid era. It not only provides a voice for ordinary, often underrepresented people who have lived through extraordinary circumstances, but does so with creative embellishment, dramatic flair and astounding impact.

And they tend to be written when needed most. With antisemitism on the rise and with two-thirds of Americans under the age of 40 not aware that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, the timing for “Leopoldstadt” is ideal. 

BOB ABELMAN is an award-winning theater critic who formerly wrote for the Austin Chronicle and Cleveland Jewish News.