Memory is chaos.
\u00a0 \u00a0 If you think you don\u2019t 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\u2019ll recognize the jumble that is your memory, your past.
\u00a0 \u00a0 Just such chaos takes the stage in Tom Stoppard\u2019s final play, \u201cLeopoldstadt,\u201d \u00a0currently bristling with life at Houston\u2019s Main Street Theater. \u00a0Premiering 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 \u2014 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0
\u00a0 \u00a0 There is less plot here than a ring-side seat to a section of time. Audiences are witnesses to families and cultures riding time\u2019s 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, \u201cHere\u2019s a couple waving goodbye from the train, but who are they? No idea! That\u2019s why they\u2019re waving goodbye. It\u2019s like a second death, to lose your name in a family album.\u201d It\u2019s a witty phrase, but in the prelude to the Holocaust, it also haunts as omens do.
\u00a0 \u00a0 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\u2019s wife, Gretl, steals from her portrait sittings for an affair with a young military officer who demeans Jewish women. Rodgers fully reveals Gretl\u2019s 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 \u201cSilent Night.\u201d\u00a0
\u00a0 \u00a0 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. \u00a0Challenging for all the performers is that their characters age as time passes between major scenes, but director Rebecca Greene Udden\u2019s steady hand and Stoppard\u2019s script give them a consistent focus throughout that is supported by Afsaneh Aayani\u2019s set design and Amber Stepanik\u2019s lush and varied costumes. All squeeze reality into Main Street\u2019s small but flexible performance space.
\u00a0 \u00a0 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 \u201cArcadia,\u201d or as epic in scope as \u201cThe Coast of Utopia,\u201d \u201cLeopoldstadt,\u201d named for a Vienna district used to separate Jews from the city\u2019s inhabitants, is nevertheless crowded with a career\u2019s wisdom and craft that shapes chaos into meaningful cultural and self-analysis. It is a fitting monument to one of England\u2019s greatest dramatists, and it is a must-see for Houston\u2019s theater goers even as\u2014or maybe because of\u2014we struggle to deal with the chaos of our families and lives.
\u00a0 \u00a0 Visit \u201cLeopoldstadt\u201d before time sweeps it and our memories of it away. \u201cLeopoldstadt\u201d is on stage at Main Street Theater in Houston until May 3.<\/p>\n
Robert\u00a0Donahoo is a professor at\u00a0Sam Houston State University and writes theater reviews for The Courier.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Memory is chaos.\u00a0 \u00a0 If you think you don\u2019t agree, recall an extended family Christmas or reunion: the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":{"0":"post-232287","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston","8":"tag-houston","9":"tag-houston-headlines","10":"tag-houston-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}