Homes Lost and Found: “Leopoldstadt” and “Remember This”
From the very first moment of Tom Stoppard’s brilliant new play Leopoldstadt, there’s a sense of disorientation that never quite goes away. The stage is filled with characters of all ages, three generations of the Metz/Jakobovicz family celebrating Christmas in 1899 Vienna. Some are Jews, and some have converted to Catholicism for the purposes of social mobility. But who is related to whom, or married to whom, and whose children are whose? While the play smartly offers individual vignettes to establish every character, keeping track of everyone is still slippery work. As the play leaps ahead first twenty-two years, then sixteen, then seventeen, in scenes that almost always involve the entire family in its latest form, that sense of confusion is renewed anew, with the added layer of trying to ascertain which adults were which children in prior scenes.
To some, all of this may seem like an error on the part of Stoppard or director Patrick Marber (who brings the play from his Olivier-winning run in the West End of London). But, in fact, the choice to set up the narrative in this way lies at the heart of this play. Whether in school, at the cinema or in our homes with our families we have all seen and heard a great deal about the brutal genocide perpetrated upon the Jewish people (as well as the Romani and others) during the Holocaust and throughout the centuries of anti-Semitism and violence that preceded it. One effect of all that information is that we begin to see those we lost as a faceless generalized group, “the six million Jews.” Stoppard and Marber seem determined to push back against that trend and by presenting us with so many characters to track the play actively instills in the audience a drive to see and value the characters as individuals. We are transformed from passive viewers to seekers and advocates.
Intriguingly, both that journey of transformation and its opposite are the storylines of the one-man show Remember This: The Story of Jan Karski, starring David Strathairn, which just finished its run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Jan Karski was a young Catholic diplomat when Germany invaded Poland in September of 1939. After some terrible months as a prisoner of war, Karski escaped back to Warsaw and became a courier passing information between the Polish underground and its government-in-exile in Paris.
In that role, Karski went twice into the Warsaw Ghetto to investigate the treatment of Polish Jews. He was stunned at what he found there. Strathairn plays the moment on stage with a kind of incredulous fragility, each step bringing him to deeper horrors and with it that much closer to emotional collapse.
In diplomatic trips to London and later the United States, Karski describes what he has seen to some of the most important political figures of that age, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden; Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. None of them say or do anything. Roosevelt doesn’t even acknowledge what he’s just been told, asking Karski instead about other aspects of the situation. Although Jewish himself, Frankfurter insists Karski can’t be correct about what’s going on. “I know humanity,” he tells Karski emphatically. “I know men. Impossible.”
In both plays confidence—whether in humanity or oneself—is the enemy; confusion is the only path to truth. It’s a cruel road. Much like the characters who either died or bore witness, we are orphaned from any trust we might have in the world.
But there is unexpected life to be found in this desert as well. Karski found it in his wife Pola, who he watched perform as a dancer in London during the war, then saw again a decade later while living in Washington, DC. The surviving characters in Leopoldstadt find it, too, in one another’s stories, jagged and confronting though they may be.
And the night I saw Leopoldstadt beauty arose amidst the audience as well. Early in the play, we watch the gathered Metz/Jakobovicz family at Passover seder. A few moments into the ritual meal, the characters on stage begin to sing the prayers. And as they did so, a couple people near where I was sitting quietly joined in.
Now, normally at the theater a moment like this is a nightmare. (I’m sorry, but you are not the performers we came here to see.) However, in this instance, these were just a few older, gentler voices, and somehow instead of pulling focus away they added to what was happening onstage.
And then other audience members joined them, and then still more, all in that same soft and almost fragile manner. I suspect everyone in the audience who knew the words would have joined in that prayer had it gone much longer. It was as though we were all together at that seder in the play.
As I left the theater, that moment gave me comfort, like fireflies dancing in a dark night.
