Theatre in Review: Leopoldstadt (Longacre Theatre)

	Photo: Joan Marcus

Tom Stoppard's latest, and possibly last, drama is a monumental work, a threnody for a family, a way of life, and an idea of civilization. It begins in 1899 with a large, wealthy, and well-connected Austrian Jewish clan making merry and ends, half a century later, with a trio of survivors, everyone else having been crushed by history's march. It is a vivid historical canvas that will send shivers through anyone worried about the rise of fascism. It's a terrible and gripping story and don't think it can't happen here.

"There's something about a theory being published at the very beginning of a new century. Like an augury. Like the curtain going up on something." So says one character of a publication by the then-controversial physician Sigmund Freud. How right he is, and how little he knows: Freud's book, about the interpretation of dreams, will cast a shadow on the nightmarish events that follow, for, underneath the carefully cultivated façade of Viennese society lurk dark, irrational impulses, a death wish waiting to surface.

Think of Leopoldstadt as a kind of mural, a series of panels depicting a nation sliding into chaos and disaster. We begin at a gathering of the Merz and Jacobovicz families for, of all things, a Christmas celebration. Heavily assimilated and intermarried, they have Catholic and Protestant branches, which explains the Star of David that makes a cameo appearance atop the tree. Hosted by the aging Emilia Merz, the get-together is a happy confusion of music, food, and children, informed by multiple overlapping conversations. The mood is busy, hilarious, festive; an air of bourgeois self-satisfaction prevails.

Of course, it does: As Hermann, who runs the textile business that is the source of the Merzes' wealth, notes, they are one or two generations away from ancestors who lived in a ghetto and needed permits to travel. "My grandfather wore a caftan, my father went to the opera in a top hat, and I have the singers to dinner," he says. "We buy the books, we look at the paintings, we go to the theatre, the restaurant, we employ music teachers for our children. A new writer, if he's a great poet like Hofmannsthal, walks among us like a demi-god. We literally worship culture!"

Indeed, Hermann and his relatives are connected to Freud, Klimt, and Schnitzler, among other prominent cultural and intellectual figures. And yet, the city's mayor has won his office on a wave of anti-Semitism and Jewish students at the university are routinely brutalized. As Ludwig, Hermann's brother-in-law and sparring partner, points out, "Episcopalians are assimilated. Zoroastrians are assimilated. I could be a Druid for all my professors care. It's only the Jews! I'm an unbeliever. I don't observe Jewish customs except as a souvenir of family ties. But to a gentile I'm a Jew."

Ludwig's point is made mortifyingly clear a little later when Hermann, trying to defend his wife's honor, is coolly rebuffed by her alleged lover, a dragoon, who notes with an arrogant smile, "In my regiment an officer is not permitted to fight a Jew." When Hermann protests that he is a baptized Christian, the officer replies, "Let me put it this way. In my regiment, an officer is not permitted to fight someone whose mother was a Jew." Even this foolish personal gesture, made in a moment of passion, is regulated by social rules, both spoken and tacit.

By 1924, the aftermath of war, the social fabric is badly fraying. Ludwig's son, Pauli, is dead, his dream of a military career terminated by a bullet at Verdun. Jacob, Hermann's son and the heir to the family business, lost an arm and an eye in battle, rendering him permanently damaged and unfit for a career. Not that there is much business to speak of. The country's economy is in tatters. As Hermann notes, the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire has left him without customers. "Fifty million people was a market. Six million people on the breadline is neither a market nor a tax base. We're living on the charity of the victors, presented as loans we can't repay."

Meanwhile, Jacob's cousin, Nellie, is busily sewing an enormous red flag, a sign that Marxist thought has joined the conversation. Yet every action brings an equally powerful reaction: A new and entirely sinister note is introduced by Otto, a banker who works for Hermann. "Marxism and nationalism are fighting for the soul of the masses," he says. "The class war turns people against each other, but nationalism binds them together." Even while working with Hermann, Otto has joined the antisemitic Greater German People's Party. "A union of German speakers is the logical thing," he says, radiating optimism.

That logic finds its fullest expression in 1938, during Kristallnacht, which finds everyone, including a new generation, holed up in Emilia's house, now in a state of disarray, with angry crowds heard outside. Percy, a British journalist engaged to Nellie, has returned from a conference in Geneva where the nations of the world have quietly declined to take in extra Jewish refugees. Rosa, a US-based cousin, is frantically trying to procure visas for them all. But it may already be too late. As Percy notes, "In Berlin the Jews are still allowed to go to the cinema, the theatre, restaurants, cafés, to use the trams, the parks, to go shopping...As antisemites the Germans have some catching up to do on the Austrians." Indeed, at least one member of the family has been sent to Dachau.

The scene becomes one of unmitigated horror with the invasion of a couple of soldiers accompanied by the Civilian, a government representative who has come requisition the house. Stoppard's sense of the brutal purposes to which language can be put is on full display here. The Civilian dismisses Eva, Hermann's sister, as "a profiteer Jew" and "an old parasite bitch." When she protests, saying, "My son, Pauli, gave his life for Austria, and he was proud to do it," the Civilian replies, "So one less Jew." This encounter evokes, better than any I have ever seen, the sheer brutality of having one's rights as a human ruthlessly stripped away.

Percy is desperate to get Nellie and Leo, her son by a previous marriage, out of the country, but the others, still clinging to a past in which their position seemed unassailable, are unable to act. As Eva insists, "When Granny Emilia was little, she walked from almost Kiev to Lvov after their village was burned down. It will pass, and something else will take its place."

What does come next, of course, is war and holocaust. In 1955, the family has been decimated; the few, far-flung survivors include Rosa, an analyst in New York; Leopold, née Rosenbaum, now Leonard Chamberlain, raised in England by his stepfather Percy; and Nathan, like his Uncle Ludwig, a gifted mathematician and the only member of his family to emerge from Auschwitz. As these three strangers try, tentatively and not without acrimony, to forge new bonds, a stunning coup de théâtre briefly restores the original family in all its glory while simultaneously revealing exactly how much has been lost.

Director Patrick Marber has orchestrated this crowded, garrulous, witty, and ultimately tragic chronicle with tremendous skill, allowing the audience to keep tabs on dozens of characters. Arguably, the dominant performances are delivered by David Krumholtz as Hermann, his bourgeois complacency subjected to increasingly severe stress tests, and Brandon Uranowitz, first as Ludwig, coolly undermining each of Hermann's propositions, and as Nathan, who, having passed through hell, regards the postwar world with sardonic detachment and bitter laughter. Both men carry the burden of Stoppard's arguments with élan while providing their characters with complex, conflicted interior lives.

But this not to ignore Betsy Aidem as Emilia, who dismisses the popular, Jewish-born composer/conductor Gustav Mahler as "another Christian still wet from baptism;" Caissie Levy as Eva, sadly noting, "My wedding ring is iron since I gave my gold ring to the Emperor's war fund;" Faye Castelow as Gretl, Hermann's charming, adulterous Catholic wife; Jenna Augen as blunt, chain-smoking, thoroughly Americanized Rosa; and Tedra Millan as Nellie, who insists, presciently, "It's the red flag or the standard of the old guard with fascism only a step away." Among the outsiders, Japhet Balaban impresses as Otto, a cheerful harbinger of doom, as does Arty Froushan as Fritz, the dragoon, who can't be bothered with Hermann's challenges, and as Percy, struggling to salvage something from the gathering storm. Seth Numrich has a foot in both camps as the eccentric, tragically wounded Jacob and the Anglicized Leonard, an author of "funny books" who retains little memory of his Viennese past.

In a stroke of genius, Richard Hudson has provided a flexible design -- consisting of ceiling moldings, a chandelier, a piano, and a decreasing number of furnishings -- that track the decline of Emilia's household. (Note the Klimt portrait of Gretl, which comes and goes.) The set seems to float eerily in a void thanks to Neil Austin's stunning use of sidelight, which finds infinite degrees of expression in various degrees of warm and cold white tones. Isaac Madge's projection design effectively spans the gaps between scenes, with images of waltzing lovers giving way to bombed-out city streets. Adam Cork's sound design also ushers in new eras: A grand waltz, with downbeats like explosions, is followed by a tinny rendition of "Yes Sir, That's My Baby." (Hang on for the disturbing roar of planes overhead.) Brigitte Reiffenstuel's gorgeously detailed costumes follow the characters across time and social status with uncanny accuracy.

In Leopoldstadt, happiness and prosperity are built on a fundamentally unsound foundation, eroded by shifting political tides. The collective existence of the Merz/Jacobovicz ménage, a succession of dinners, Seders, flirtations, musicales, affairs, compromising letters, gossip, and endless political arguments, is so entrancing that they can't sense the trap door opening beneath them. Hermann, irritated by the Zionist Theodor Herzl, calls him "a man with a beehive in his bonnet, a fantasy of the Jews of Europe and America uprooting themselves for a utopia among goatherds, which wouldn't even have a common language!" He adds that the family's wealth is meant "to put us at the beating heart of Viennese culture." But when that culture is poisoned by hatred and the worship of power, there is no escape. If this indeed Stoppard's final work, he is going out with a masterpiece. --David Barbour