Memory is chaos.
If you think you don’t agree, recall an extended family Christmas or reunion: the food, the decorating, the fragments of conversation at multiple age-levels that whirled round the house, the spats, the variety of lives whirling off in different directions, the sounds of laughter and of worry. See if all these spinning dishes in the air can form a coherent whole, and you’ll recognize the jumble that is your memory, your past.
Just such chaos takes the stage in Tom Stoppard’s final play, “Leopoldstadt,” currently bristling with life at Houston’s Main Street Theater. Premiering in London in 2020 before earning a Tony award on Broadway in 2023, it is a gargantuan undertaking: over 30 characters, ranging from infants to elderly, and spanning the tumultuous first five decades of the 20th century — from Sigmund Freud to the Cold War. All are shuffled together in a single apartment in Vienna. And accompanying the physical cast and set are Stoppard’s typical side dishes of history, mathematics, and even his personal struggles as an eight-year-old Jewish immigrant to England who, burying his roots, writes his way to the pinnacle of British theatre and culture.
There is less plot here than a ring-side seat to a section of time. Audiences are witnesses to families and cultures riding time’s waves, and Stoppard is nothing if not magical at finding metaphors and symbols for the motion, giving us language that lasts longer than the characters. Grandma Emilia looking at a photo album tells her daughter-in-law Wilma, “Here’s a couple waving goodbye from the train, but who are they? No idea! That’s why they’re waving goodbye. It’s like a second death, to lose your name in a family album.” It’s a witty phrase, but in the prelude to the Holocaust, it also haunts as omens do.
For such massive material to avoid collapse under its own weight, the production requires at least a dozen or more gem-like performances as undergirding. And this production has them in abundance, particularly Dain Geist as Hermann Merz, the financial center of his family who has converted to Catholicism, keenly aware of the growing antisemitism of Vienna and the business circles where his profits have raised him. Meanwhile Meg Rodgers as Hermann’s wife, Gretl, steals from her portrait sittings for an affair with a young military officer who demeans Jewish women. Rodgers fully reveals Gretl’s blind plunge into hedonism. Zack Varella as Ludwig, a theoretical math professor, understands the dangers of assimilation without equality for Jews but cannot develop a practical scheme to save himself and his family. Nadia Diamond as Hanna, the youngest sister of Wilma and Ludwig, is a timid dreamer who is as cautious approaching life as she is her piano keyboard. Though she dreams of love and passion, she lightly touches the keys for “Silent Night.”
These are only the most prominent of the performances, but they are well supported by secondary figures, including Shannon Emerick as Wilma, Karen Ross as Grandma Emilia, James Cardwell as Fritz, and the superb performances by children. Challenging for all the performers is that their characters age as time passes between major scenes, but director Rebecca Greene Udden’s steady hand and Stoppard’s script give them a consistent focus throughout that is supported by Afsaneh Aayani’s set design and Amber Stepanik’s lush and varied costumes. All squeeze reality into Main Street’s small but flexible performance space.
But the major accolades go to the script. If not as comic and surprising as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, as philosophical and heartbreaking as “Arcadia,” or as epic in scope as “The Coast of Utopia,” “Leopoldstadt,” named for a Vienna district used to separate Jews from the city’s inhabitants, is nevertheless crowded with a career’s wisdom and craft that shapes chaos into meaningful cultural and self-analysis. It is a fitting monument to one of England’s greatest dramatists, and it is a must-see for Houston’s theater goers even as—or maybe because of—we struggle to deal with the chaos of our families and lives.
Visit “Leopoldstadt” before time sweeps it and our memories of it away. “Leopoldstadt” is on stage at Main Street Theater in Houston until May 3.
Robert Donahoo is a professor at Sam Houston State University and writes theater reviews for The Courier.