'The Legend'

 

[This post is about Washington Irving and the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  Before you get into the report on the centerpiece of that celebration, I want to point out some older posts on Rick On Theater that pertain to Irving (though they’re not all related the famous tale).

[In 2010, I posted six “Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle” (13-28 August) on the subject of New York theater, written in 1802 and 1803.  (Jonathan Oldstyle was one of the pseudonyms Irving used.)  On 25 November 2009, I posted “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Children’s Theater in America,” a report on theater for young audiences in which I used a production of a musical adaptation of the story by my friend Kirk Woodward as a model to discuss making theater for children.

[In “A Helluva Town, Part 3” (9 January 2012), I included a section on “‘Knickerbocker’ and Sleepy Hollow,” a short piece on the origins of the use of the name Knickerbocker in New York and a little history of the name Sleepy Hollow (which is retold below as well).]

Washington Irving (1783-1859), often called the Father of American Literature, published the second of his two most famous short stories, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in 1820 (the first was “Rip Van Winkle,” published in 1819). 

Irving was born in New York City, but because of a yellow fever outbreak in the city in 1798, his family sent him 30 miles north to stay with friends in Tarrytown, where he first became familiar with the stories and legends around the nearby town that’s now called Sleepy Hollow.

In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving wrote:

There is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world.  A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose. . . .  From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of Sleepy Hollow . . . .  The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions.

In 1835, he bought property in Tarrytown and he moved there from New York City.  During the early colonial period, place names were pretty much traditional: someone came up with a name for a settlement, a village, or a valley, and if it stuck, that’s what it was called. 

The village of Tarrytown seems to have been established under that name, based on an earlier Dutch appellation, in the 17th century.  (The English took over the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1674 and many Dutch names were either translated or anglicized.)  The village was incorporated as Tarrytown in 1870.

The little village seven miles north of Tarrytown, however, had a slightly different story.  When it was part of New Netherland, around 1655, the area around it was dubbed Slapershaven or, literally, Sleepers’ Haven.  After the English took control, the area and the village assumed several different informal names.  In 1874, the village incorporated as North Tarrytown.

Sleepy Hollow—derived, I imagine, from an English approximation of the traditional Dutch designation Slapershaven—was then only a made-up name created in the imagination of Washington Irving.  It seems to have existed as a common usage for places, such as the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (which Irving himself named) of the Old Dutch Church and Sleepy Hollow Manor, an upscale residential neighborhood with historic homes; but not the village of North Tarrytown. 

That is, until 1996, when the residents of North Tarrytown voted two to one to rename the village Sleepy Hollow to capitalize on the famous story and to differentiate it from Tarrytown.  Once the legalities (such as notifying the U.S. Postal Service) were completed, the town where Irving’s famous and popular story is set, was finally a real place, named on maps of the state and the county of Westchester.

(In an amusing sidebar, the football team of the former North Tarrytown high school is named The Horsemen.  That ranks right up there with the sports teams from the Key West school in Florida, whose name is The Fighting Conchs.)

Around this time of year, the New York area Irving christened “Sleepy Hollow Country,” which includes not only the village formerly known as North Tarrytown, but Tarrytown itself and the nearby village of Dearman, which in 1854 renamed itself Irvington in honor of the famous writer who was living in Tarrytown, bustles with visitors looking for a Halloween experience.

For most of the country, at least in the Northeast, Salem, Massachusetts, has claimed the title of Halloween capital of the world.  But Sleepy Hollow is putting up a challenge now.  Irving’s “Legend” is, after all, arguably the most iconic ghost story in the country’s literature.  Sleepy Hollow Country is a natural Halloween tourist destination.

Year round, there are sites related to “Legend,” starting with the Old Dutch Church, where the Headless Horseman started his ride.  It still stands in Sleepy Hollow since 1699, with the Old Dutch Burying Ground where the graves of Katrina Van Tassell and Abraham Martling (the model for Brom Bones), prominent characters in Irving’s tale, can be found.  (There are tours of the church and cemetery.)

Next to the burial ground in the churchyard is the contiguous, but separate Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where, aside from Washington Irving himself, a number of famous people are buried, including Andrew Carnegie, Walter P. Chrysler, Brooke Astor, and Elizabeth Arden).

Also in Sleepy Hollow is a bridge over the Pocantico River with a historical marker that reads: “The Headless Horseman Bridge described by Irving in the Legend of Sleepy Hollow formerly spanned this stream at this spot.”  It’s not the actual bridge, which was replaced long ago, and the location of the span Irving knew was in reality further upstream within Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, but never mind . . . .

In Tarrytown is Sunnyside, the home of Washington Irving from 1835 until his death in 1859 (of a heart attack at 76).  Before Irving bought the property and built Sunnyside, the land was owned until 1802 by the Van Tassel family.  There are events staged here relating to “Legend” and the house is open for tours as well.

“People want to believe in ghosts and things like that,” observed Mayor Ken Wray of Sleepy Hollow, “and it’s fun to do that.  And then you get here and you get into the woods, you get into the cemetery and go ‘Yeah, I could see this happening here.’“

There are other curious sights in Sleepy Hollow Country which aren’t associated with “Legend,” one of which is in Irvington (3 miles south of Tarrytown and another half mile further on to Sleepy Hollow).  Built in 1859-60, the Armour-Stiner House (aka: the Octagon House) is, aside from its architectural oddity, supposed to be haunted.  (It’s been featured in several horror films, such as 1981’s The Nesting.)

Sleepy Hollow Country has also built up its catalogue of Halloween events, including many that aren’t related to Irving’s scary tale.  The Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze at Van Cortlandt Manor in Croton-on-Hudson displays over 7,000 elaborately carved, illuminated pumpkins.

Sleepy Hollow itself, however, was the scene of a new attraction this fall that was very specifically planned to relate to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  It’s creators had been working on it for two years.

Since the reason for adopting the name Sleepy Hollow was largely to increase focus on the town’s connection to Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and the association with Irving himself, who lived in Tarrytown and died there, but is buried in Sleepy Hollow, what could be more natural than to host a big celebration of the bicentennial anniversary of the story’s publication?

But that was going to be in 2020, right in the middle of the COVID pandemic.  So the celebration was postponed (twice) and this fall, the town mounted a special, 90-minute performance called The Legend that ran weekends from Friday, 23 September, through Sunday, 23 October.  (The production had originally been scheduled to close on 16 October, but its popularity resulted in a week’s extension.)

The Legend, in the words of its own promotional material, was “created and performed by Westchester Circus Arts” and presented by the Village of Sleepy Hollow (with a grant from New York State).  It makes “groundbreaking use of holograms of Washington Irving and the Headless Horseman, combined with live action circus performers to tell the story” of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to commemorate its 200th anniversary.  (The actors whose images were digitized for the holograms weren’t identified.)

Performances were mounted in a large blue-and-yellow circus tent on the banks of the Hudson River in Sleepy Hollow’s East Parcel, the former parking lot of the now-closed General Motors automobile assembly plant on the west side of the village. 

(The plant, known as North Tarrytown Assembly, was closed by GM and transferred to the Village of Sleepy Hollow in 1996.  The 90 acres is split into two parcels by New York State’s Metro-North commuter railroad tracks.  The west side of the tracks is dedicated to mostly residential development; the East Parcel, as the other half is called, is used for public works facilities and amenities for public recreation.)

On the production’s own website (The Legend (sleepyhollowlegend.com)), Westchester Circus Arts describes The Legend as “a simmering adaptation of Washington Irving’s iconic ghost story, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’  Audiences will be treated to a cirque/theatre noir production with narration by Washington Irving himself—in hologram form.”  (The Legend was recommended for viewers ages 10 and up, but younger children attended the performances and cheered and gasped right along with their older peers.)

(Cirque, contemporary circus, new circus, or nouveau cirque is a genre of performing arts developed in the early 1970s to the mid-1980s in which a story or theme is conveyed through traditional circus skills.  Theatre noir, as far as I can determine, is, in this usage, to theater what film noir is to cinema.)

For those who don’t already know Irving’s “Legend,” the WCA retelling, created, produced, and written by Carlo Pellegrini of Westchester Circus Arts and directed by Hilary Sweeney, WCA’s founder, is set in Sleepy Hollow and “Tarry Town” (as Irving styled it) in the early 1800s.  Irving, in the form of a hologram (created by the Montreal-based Neweb Labs), returns in the present day to tell us what he really meant by “the legend.”  

The story follows schoolteacher Ichabod Crane (played by Justin Durham, hand balancer and straps artist) who has, of late, been down on his luck but finds adventure when he accepts an invitation to teach the children of Sleepy Hollow.

Everything changes when the beautiful heiress of the Van Tassel fortune, Katrina Van Tassel (Zoë Isadora, third generation circus artist—a member of the famous “Flying Wallendas” family), enters the ballroom of her father’s (Carlo Pellegrini) holiday party by performing a seductive aerial ballet on silks.  Ichabod is stricken by his good fortune and believes he has the savoir faire to win Katrina’s hand—and her father’s money.

When Katrina’s presumed beau, Brom Bones (Mickey Lonsdale, comedic actor and acrobatic dancer), sees Katrina’s interest in Ichabod, the game’s afoot!  Ichabod finds himself involved in what may become a deadly love triangle, spurred by Brom’s practical—and perhaps fatal—jokes.  

What neither suitor realizes is that Katrina possesses a “very particular set of skills” and can summon “the Haunting Spirit” (Doug Stewart of Cirque Us) with incantations reminiscent of The Exorcist.  The intrigue mounts: is the “Haunting Spirit” the ghostly and ghastly Headless Horseman villagers see at night in pursuit of his prey?  Or is it something else that causes Ichabod to vanish suddenly one night in an epic battle between Light and Dark?

In addition to the cirque theatricalization of the storytelling, the WCA presentation is modernized for 21st-century audiences.  Katrina is “much more than the pretty face” that encourages the competition between Ichabod and Brom Bones.

“We figured, let’s bring it up to contemporary times and make Katrina that powerful woman who almost becomes the leader of the story,” revealed director Sweeney.

Producing The Legend had been a years-long effort by the Village of Sleepy Hollow’s administrator and grant writer, Anthony Giaccio and Fiona Matthew.  They re-engaged longtime collaborators Westchester Circus Arts to create a show that would celebrate the bicentennial of the publication of Irving’s story.  WCA had begun exploring the concept of holograms as part of the cirque performance with Neweb Labs to find out if the idea was possible for the bicentennial’s true date, two years ago. 

Westchester Circus Arts is a 10-year-old, woman-owned business, founded by circus artist Hilary Sweeney.  An aerialist for over 15 years, she’s performed in Cirque le Masque’s Carnivale, Above the Belt Off-Broadway at the Zipper Theater, Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, ImaginAerial, Grounded Aerial, and more.  Prior to her circus career she trained from the age of 5 in ballet.

Sweeney’s co-director, Carlo Pellegrini, is a veteran circus performer with over 40 years of professional circus experience who traveled the world with Lichtenstein Circus, Big Apple Circus, and Nikolais Dance Theater.  He’s a social circus educator and founder of Amazing Grace Circus, a community circus with a social purpose.

(According to the American Circus Educators Association, “Social Circus refers to the use of circus arts as a medium for social justice and individual wellness and uplifts the role of art and culture as powerful agents for change.  Social Circus practitioners support participants as creative change makers through the collective development of self-esteem, solidarity, and trust.”)

The tale is told by Irving, who’s the only character in The Legend who speaks.  “I came back 200 years later to explain what I really meant by the legend,” says the virtual Irving . . . and the show begins.

The five live performers interpret the spirit and emotional content of the story with acrobatics and circus arts.  Most of the action is center stage, but some of the performances are aerial work above the audience’s heads.

“Thanks to a pulley system stage-right,” reported John Soltes of Hollywood Soapbox, “the performers swing about from various rigs, always amazing the crowd below.”  The pulleys are operated in full view of the spectators, schooling them in the theatrical magic that goes on behind the scenes of such flying circus acts.  (It’s a peek behind the Wizard’s curtain in Oz!)

Among the more grounded work included performers balancing on their hands on wooden poles and juggling—using apples to match the spirit of the season.  The duel between Ichabod and Brom Bones, showing off Durham’s and Lonsdale’s acrobatic skills, consisted of jumping and rolling on a barrel that served as a platform.

Soltes proclaimed the presentation “a marvel to behold” on Hollywood Soapbox replete with “Gothic romance, . . . fearful trepidation, . . . dastardly villainy.”  Durham and Isadora “dazzle as would-be lovers” as they “couple obvious physical strength with touching artistry.” 

Describing the virtual recreation of Iriving as “exquisite hologram technology,” which “allows the performers to focus on their physical work and not have to remember any lines of dialogue,” Soltes advised that “audience members should strap in for a wild ride.”

He admonished ticket-holders, however, “not [to] go in expecting the death-defying feats that larger circus companies employ; instead, they should sit back and enjoy the stunning singularity and intimacy of the one-on-one cirque experience.” 

Soltes concluded by affirming that “The Legend is an enjoyable entry in the Halloween season of Sleepy Hollow Country,” adding, “One hopes that Westchester Circus Arts and the Village of Sleepy Hollow make this legendary Legend an annual tradition.”  (He wasn’t the only reviewer to express such a wish.)

On Woman Around Town, a website that offers guides for women to New York City and Washington, D.C., MJ Hanley-Goff began by describing the start of her Legend experience: “The flaps of the circus tent whipping from the winds coming over the Hudson River was a perfect, though most likely unintended, special effect during a preview performance.” 

Hanley-Goff went on to give a general run-down of the show:

With a “cirque theatre performance,” three of the main characters swing about the stage in an “aerial ballet” telling the story about an innocent schoolteacher who falls under the spell of the seductress, Katrina, and is out to win her hand.  Standing in his way is another suitor, Brom Bones, and the two end up in a battle that is more a gymnastic dance than street brawl, as a dark spirit spirals his way across the flowing drapes hanging from the circus top.  

News 12 Connecticut, an outlet of a group of regional cable news channels in the New York metropolitan area that provides news coverage 24 hours a day, labeled The Legend a “horrifying and thrilling entertainment experience.”

Debra C. Argen and Edward F. Nesta proclaimed The Legend “spectacular and mesmerizing” on the website Luxury Experience, an online consumer resource.  They found that “its gravity-defying aerial work . . . had our hearts pounding with excitement, and the acrobatic groundwork . . . added another essential element of surprise and daring to the nuanced performance.”

The writers found the holographic Irving’s description “[h]auntingly narrated” and “[d]eftly and creatively told,” and reported that the performance “had us on the edge of our seats with the hairs on the back of our necks sticking up as we watched the legendary tale unfold above and around us.”

Because “the performers are well-versed in their disciplines,” the writers deemed “their performances . . . engaging and dynamic.”  They affirmed, “We love the contemporary cirques, and Westchester Circus Arts was truly brilliant,” singling out “the exhilarating aerial work performed by Justin Durham, Doug Stewart, and Zoë Isadora.”

Argen and Nesta declared that attending The Legend was “the perfect way to get a jump start on Halloween!”  The production provided “a sensational . . . experience,” the writers asserted, adding, “If you love Halloween, you must see The LEGEND.”

Tom Stoppard & 'Leopoldstadt'

 

[Tom Stoppard is one of my favorite playwrights; since I first encountered his work some fifty-odd years ago, I have reveled in his wordplay and his convoluted logic and intellectualism.  I was delighted when I was watching the PBS NewsHour as usual earlier this month and anchor Judy Woodruff announced a segment on Stoppard and his new play, Leopoldstadt.  I knew at once that I would download the transcript to post on Rick On Theater.

[I first experienced Stoppard’s work sometime between December 1969 and February 1970, while I was in the army and stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  I attended several plays at the five-year-old Actors Theatre of Louisville, just 45 minutes north of the army base along U.S. Route 31W, known as the “Dixie Dieway.”  This was my first encounter with ATL, now one of this country’s premier regional theater companies.

[I saw at least three plays at ATL, then located in the former Illinois Central Railway Station before moving to its present location in 1972.  One was a Hamlet, which suffered an electrical mishap near the start of the performance and had to do the rest of the show under house lights. 

[Another production was Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by newly appointed artistic director Jon Jory and featuring his parents, famous movie actor Victor Jory as Big Daddy and Jean Inness as Big Mama.  This was when I learned that Cat had two endings because director Elia Kazan made Williams change his original last act for the Broadway première in 1955.  (The Elizabeth Taylor-Paul Newman film of 1958 used the second version; Jory staged Williams’s first ending.)

[The third play I saw at ATL knocked me out because I’d never before seen anything like it: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  The deconstruction of Hamlet, the verbal play, the twisty logic, the philosophical underpinning, the fundamental question of how we know what we (think we) know, all made my mind spin and my mouth gape.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern immediately became one of my top favorite plays. 

[I’ve seen many of Stoppard’s plays since then.  I did one of my first acting-class scenes from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  Later I played Moon in The Real Inspector Hound and I used a speech from Jumpers as an audition piece for a number of years.  I haven’t caught all of them, but many of the plays listed below have been part of my theater experience.]

“PLAYWRIGHT TOM STOPPARD GRAPPLES WITH HIS HIDDEN PAST IN LATEST WORK”
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport 

[This is the transcript of correspondent Jeffrey Brown’s interview with British playwright Tom Stoppard from the PBS NewsHour broadcast on 17 October 2022.  Following this, I’ve posted a short biographical sketch of the Czech-born dramatist with a run-down of his writings, and then a review from the New Yorker of Stoppard’s current Broadway offering, Leopoldstadt, which is the topic of the NewsHour interview.]

In a new Broadway play, one of the world’s greatest writers, grapples with his own hidden past and its implications for our time. Sir Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” chronicles a family history he only learned about in his 50s when a relative told him that all four of his Jewish grandparents had been murdered by the Nazis. Jeffrey Brown talks to Stoppard for our arts and culture series, “CANVAS.”

Judy Woodruff: In a new Broadway play, one of the world’s greatest writers grapples with his own hidden past and its implications for our time.

Jeffrey Brown talks with playwright Sir Tom Stoppard for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): You are not looking.

(LAUGHTER)

Jeffrey Brown: The year is 1899, Vienna.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): It is a beautiful star, darling, but it’s not the star we put at the top of our Christmas tree.

Jeffrey Brown: The members of the Merz clan, an assimilated Jewish family in which a confused grandchild can put a Star of David atop a Christmas tree, feel themselves full members of our highly cultured Viennese society and Austro-Hungarian empire.

Over the coming years and generations, they will learn how wrong they are.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): To a Gentile, I am a Jew. There isn’t a Gentile anywhere who at one moment or another hasn’t thought, “Jew.”

Jeffrey Brown: Nearly every family member we meet in the play “Leopoldstadt” will be killed or die as a result of the Holocaust.

It’s a devastating story of a family tree cut down, one that’s impacting audiences and playwright Tom Stoppard himself in ways he hadn’t expected.

Sir Tom Stoppard, Playwright: I came out very dry-eyed and quite happy with the show. A woman approached me. And she was drenched in tears. And I suddenly started crying with her.

I just went — I just switched straight into her state of mind. And, actually, this is new with me. I have shed more tears over watching “Leopoldstadt” than the rest of my work put together.

Jeffrey Brown: Stoppard, now 85 and often described as the greatest living English playwright, has written some 37 plays and earned four Tony Awards.

Speaker (scene from “Shakespeare in Love”): That woman is a woman!

Jeffrey Brown: He also won an Oscar for the screenplay of the movie “Shakespeare in Love.”

“Leopoldstadt” is different and more personal, a kind of coming to terms with what he saw as the charmed life he’d lived and all that it concealed.

We talked recently at famed Broadway restaurant Sardi’s.

Sir Tom Stoppard: And by the time I was an English schoolboy, then an English journalist, and then an English playwright, the idea of having a kind of charmed life was familiar to me, until it turned and bit me, because, finally, I felt rebuked by the attitude.

Jeffrey Brown: Tom Stoppard, the English playwright, was born Tomas Straussler in 1937 in Czechoslovakia. His parents, Jewish on both sides, took him and his brother to Singapore to escape the Nazi invasion. His father was killed by the Japanese, and his mother fled again, taking her sons to India, where she later married an Englishman.

At age 8, young Tom was brought to England, his Jewish past and family left behind.

Was it a question of knowing, or a suppressed past, or a lack of desire to know about it?

Sir Tom Stoppard: All of the above. My mother was very relieved to have found sanctuary for herself and her two sons when the war ended. She didn’t want to look back, and she never spoke about the past, except just very casually occasionally.

And I also have to own up to not really having sufficient curiosity about it, partly because my mother didn’t want to talk about it.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): There are thousands leaving every month. The Office of Jewish Immigration can’t get rid of the Jews fast enough.

Jeffrey Brown: “Leopoldstadt” is the result of years of reckoning with a history Stoppard only learned about in full in his 50s, when a Czech relative told him that all four of his Jewish grandparents and three of his mother’s sisters had been murdered by the Nazis.

The play’s family is not his, but their experiences would have been similar.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): By miracle, Hermann has kept the business going through war, revolution, inflation and now Anschluss, and saved it for Jacob. Why give it all away now?

[Anschluss (or Anschluß) is the common German word of ‘connection,’ but in this context, it’s usually translated as ‘annexation,’ specifically of Austria by the Third Reich (in 1938). (That funny little squiggle at the end of the second spelling is the Eszett, a letter only used in Standard German—the Swiss no longer use it, for instance—that represents a double-s in certain instances.)]

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): The Nazis will take it.

Jeffrey Brown: The Nazis do take, all of it, the business, the home, and most of their lives.

And then Stoppard gives us a final scene set after the war in 1955.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): No more family business.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): And not much family, a New Yorker, an Austrian, and a clean young Englishman.

Jeffrey Brown: With three survivors, one of them a young Englishman, who’d come to his new country at age 8 and was oblivious to the Holocaust horror and toll on his own family.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): I’m sorry you had a rotten war.

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): A rotten war?

Speaker (scene from “Leopoldstadt”): Yes, I’m sorry.

Jeffrey Brown: A stand-in for Stoppard himself.

Sir Tom Stoppard: The boy in the play is rebuked in the words, you live as if without history. And that was rather me.

Jeffrey Brown: The specific line is: “You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.”

That was you?

Sir Tom Stoppard: Yes. Yes.

And I guess this play “Leopoldstadt” is the shadow behind me.

Jeffrey Brown: The play also, he knows, has a new relevance and force to it . . .

Marchers: Jews will not replace us!

Jeffrey Brown: . . . as overt antisemitism has been on the rise around the globe.

Sir Tom Stoppard: There’s a line in the play where the young man says to the Jewish survivor, he says, it can’t happen again. And it feels such a clunky line. It’s a line plucked from the clunkiness of how long people have been in the past.

But it’s inescapable now.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s resonating again.

Sir Tom Stoppard: It’s certainly resonating. And all kinds of things are now happening in America, as in Europe, which you would not have anticipated a generation ago, half-a-generation ago.

Jeffrey Brown: After “Leopoldstadt” premiered in London just before the pandemic began, Stoppard caused tremors in the theater world by suggesting this could be his final play.

Now, as it stuns audiences on Broadway, he’s resolved to continue.

Sir Tom Stoppard: I don’t know what the thing is that I’m going to be turned on by. And it could be anything. And that is my situation as I sit here talking to you, Jeff. It could be anything. And I’d like to get back to my desk and write another play.

Jeffrey Brown: “Leopoldstadt” is scheduled to run through March 12.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown on Broadway.

[In his more than 30-year career with the PBS NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe. As arts correspondent he has profiled many of the world's leading writers, musicians, actors, and other artists. Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Coordinating Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.]

*  *  *  *
A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF TOM STOPPARD 

Sir Tom Stoppard, widely regarded as the English-speaking world’s greatest living playwright, was born Tomáš Sträussler on 3 July 1937 in Zlín, Czechoslovakia (now in the Czech Republic).  One of the most intellectual of modern playwrights—though he never went to university—his work has been described as “plays of ideas,” philosophical deliberations made entertaining mostly by their wordplay, jokes, innuendo, and sense of fun.

Stoppard’s parents, Eugen Sträussler (1908-42), a doctor, and Marta (Becková) Sträussler (1911-98), were non-observant Jews and when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in July 1939, the Sträusslers fled to Singapore, where the company for which Dr. Sträussler worked had a branch. 

After the Japanese invasion (February 1942), Eugen Sträussler sent his wife and sons Tomáš and Petr (b. 1935) to India while he stayed behind to help the British army as a medical volunteer.  Dr. Sträussler was killed trying to escape Singapore in 1942 when the ship he was on was bombed by the Japanese.

In late 1945, Marta Sträussler married Major Kenneth Stoppard of the British army.  The next year, the family went to live in England where Tomáš Sträussler became Tom Stoppard and Petr became Peter; both boys took their stepfather’s surname.  Stoppard quit school at 17 and started his career as a journalist in Bristol in 1954.

He began to write plays in 1960 after moving to London.  His first play, A Walk on the Water (1960), was televised in 1963 and the stage version, with some additions and the new title Enter a Free Man, reached London in 1968 (New York première at the Theater at St. Clement’s Church, 1974).

1966 saw the publication of Stoppard’s only novel, Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon (U.S. publication, 1969).  That same year, Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was performed at the Edinburgh Festival.  Arguably his best-known play, it rapidly became internationally renowned.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern transferred to Broadway in 1967 and received a Tony Award for best play.  More successes followed.  

[I posted a two-part analysis of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, entitled “Theatrical Structure,” on Rick On Theater on 15 and 18 February 2011.]

Among the playwright’s most notable stage plays are The Real Inspector Hound (1968; Off-Broadway, New York, 1972), Jumpers (1972; Broadway, 1974), Travesties (1974; also Broadway, Tony Award for best play), Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1978; New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House, 1979), Night and Day (1978; Broadway, 1979), Undiscovered Country (1980, adapted from a play by Arthur Schnitzler; U.S. première by Connecticut’s Hartford Stage Company, 1981; no New York production), and On the Razzle (1981, adapted from a play by Johann Nestroy; U.S. première at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., 1982; Off-Broadway, Bouwerie Lane Theatre, 1999).

(The National Theatre staging of On the Razzle was filmed and broadcast on the BBC on 30 January 1983.  It was subsequently aired in the U.S. on PBS’s Great Performances on 3 January 1986.)

The Tony-winning The Real Thing (1982; Broadway, 1984), Stoppard’s first romantic comedy, deals with art and reality and features a playwright as a protagonist.  Arcadia, which juxtaposes 19th-century Romanticism and 20th-century chaos theory and is set in a Derbyshire country house, premièred at the National Theatre in 1993 (Broadway. 1995), and The Invention of Love, about A. E. Housman, was first staged in 1997 (Broadway. 2001).

During a lunch break in rehearsals at Arcadia one day in 1993, a year after the fall of European communism, Stoppard met for the first time with visiting Czech relatives.  A cousin made a stunning revelation: the writer’s parents were both Jewish. (Immediately after the war and the Stoppards’ move to England, his stepfather had told him to keep his Jewish heritage a secret for safety’s sake.  He’d thought that just his father was Jewish.)

The dramatist also learned that many of his relatives, including all four grandparents, a great-grandparent, and three of his mother’s sisters, had perished in Nazi death camps.  He was stunned.

Stoppard didn’t confront the matter of his lost past directly as a dramatist until 2020’s Leopoldstadt (see below), a play about several generations of a Jewish family like his own might have been, living in Vienna through the Anschluss, World War II, and the Holocaust.

The trilogy The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage), first performed in 2002 (Broadway, 2006/07), explores the lives and debates of a circle of 19th-century Russian émigré intellectuals; it received a Tony Award for best play.  Heroes (2005; U.S. première, Los Angeles, 2007; New York première, Off-Broadway, 2009), translated from a play by Gérald Sibleyras, is set in a retirement home for French soldiers, and it received a Laurence Olivier Award for best new comedy (see my report on ROT on 26 March 2009). 

Rock ’n’ Roll (2006; Broadway, 2007) jumps between England and Czechoslovakia during the period 1968-90.  In The Hard Problem (2015; Off-Broadway, Public Theater, 2018), Stoppard explored consciousness.  Leopoldstadt (West End, 2020), Stoppard’s latest play, follows a Jewish family in Vienna from the early 20th century through the Holocaust; the critically acclaimed work won the Olivier Award for best new play.  Leopoldstadt opened on Broadway on 2 October 2022.

The new play, possibly Stoppard’s last, he predicts, was met in London with laudatory reviews.  The production received two Olivier Awards, including one for Best Play.  In New York City, where it opened just three weeks ago, it’s received good to excellent notices (one of which is posted below) and is being seen as the writer’s most emotional play of his canon.

Stoppard also wrote a number of radio plays, including In the Native State (1991), which was reworked as the stage play Indian Ink (1995; Off-Broadway, Roundabout Theatre Company, 2014).  He also wrote a number of notable television plays, such as Professional Foul (BBC, 1977).  

Among his early screenplays are those for The Romantic Englishwoman (Dial Films and Les Productions Meric-Matalon, 1975), Despair (Filmverlag der Autoren, 1978), and Brazil (Embassy International Pictures, 1985), as well as for a film version (Brandenberg and WNET/Channel 13 New York, 1990) of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead that he also directed.

In 1999, the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love (Bedford Falls, 1998), cowritten by Stoppard and Marc Norman, won an Academy Award. Stoppard also adapted the French screenplay for the English-language film Vatel (Legende Enterprises and Gaumont, 2000), about a 17th-century chef, and wrote the screenplay for Enigma (Jagged Films snd Broadway Video, 2001), which chronicles the English effort to break the German Enigma code in World War II.

The dramatist later penned scripts for a lavish miniseries (BBC, 2012; HBO, 2013) based on novelist Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End and for a film adaptation (Working Title Films and StudioCanal, 2012) of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.  He also cowrote the historical drama Tulip Fever (Worldview Entertainment, Weinstein Company, and Ruby Films, 2017), which is set in 17th-century Amsterdam.

Stoppard received a C.B.E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1978 and was knighted in 1997 for contributions to theater by Queen Elizabeth II.  His numerous other honors include the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theater/film (2009) and, he was awarded the Order of Merit in May 2000 and elected an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences, in July 2017.  

On 23 February 2021, Alfred A. Knopf released Hermione Lee’s biography Tom Stoppard: A Life (also available in paperback and audiobook).  Leopoldstadt was published in 2020 by Grove Press.

*  *  *  *
“TOM STOPPARD RESURRECTS THE PAST IN ‘LEOPOLDSTADT’”
by Helen Shaw

A crowded portrait of a glittering prewar Jewish milieu exorcises the playwright’s own ghosts.

[Helen Shaw’s review of Leopoldstadt ran in “The Theatre” section of the New Yorker in the 17 October 2022 issue.  It was posted on the magazine’s website on 6 October 2022.]

The word on “Leopoldstadt,” the latest drama by Tom Stoppard (at the Longacre), is that this time, at last, he gets personal. In Hermione Lee’s immense 2020 Stoppard biography [Tom Stoppard: A Life, 896 pages], in recent interviews and profiles, and even via links e-mailed to ticket buyers before the show, we read that the playwright has finally abandoned what Clive James [1939-2019; Australian critic, journalist, broadcaster, writer, and lyricist who worked in the U.K.] called his “ebullient detachment” and broached the topic of his Jewish identity and a long-gestating survivor’s grief. Some critics have been looking for this turn for decades. In 1977, in this magazine, Kenneth Tynan compared the stories Stoppard used in his plays (wild coincidences with peacocks and shaving foam) with the one he never did share: his 1939 flight, at the age of eighteen months, from the Nazis. He was then Tomáš Sträussler, and he travelled with his Jewish family from Czechoslovakia to Singapore; his mother then evacuated him and his brother to Darjeeling, and from there to England, where he was given a new name and little knowledge of all that had been lost. Stoppard was fifty-six before he learned the facts about his Czech family’s religion, the extent of their persecution, and the long list of cousins and aunts and grandparents who were murdered in the camps.

Given the rumors of “Leopoldstadt”’s autobiographical underpinnings, it is somewhat surprising to find that when the curtain rises we are not in Prague but in Vienna, in a bustling apartment where two intermarried, interfaith families, the Merzes and the Jakoboviczes, meet and celebrate. In five intermissionless acts, Stoppard rappels down the twentieth century: we see the families in 1899, 1900, 1924, 1938, and 1955. The set designer Richard Hudson shows us the Merzes’ stately apartment as it changes over time, from brocade-upholstered warmth to interwar sleekness, then from post-Anschluss tenement squalor to a terrible postwar emptiness. In each section, characters turn to or away from their Jewishness, often looking for a sense of belonging or national identity or safety. Of course, there is never safety. We hear history (a subliminal rumble from the sound designer Adam Cork) preparing to break over the families like a wave.

In 1899, the Merz family is prosperous and variously assimilationist—we begin at a glittering Christmas party, which has a tree topped accidentally with a Star of David—but they and the Jakoboviczes will fall through two World Wars, losing nearly everything in the process. “Leopoldstadt” requires more than two dozen performers, and many actors play several parts, including children who grow up and whose identities must be referred to at a dash. How to keep the generations straight? A handwritten family tree appears several times in slides on a black scrim that serves as the stage curtain, and the program helps, but for much of the show’s two-plus hours the audience is left scrambling to remember when Hermann Merz (David Krumholtz) and his wife, Gretl (Faye Castelow), had a child, and whether shy Hanna (Colleen Litchfield) is Gretl’s niece or her sister-in-law. Stoppard makes jokes about this complexity—characters stumble over the relationships, too—though the humor is not always intentional. One cousin asks another if she remembers a certain dead soldier’s childhood, and the woman responds, “He was the nicest big brother in the world.” We can assume she remembers him.

The first scene is a welter of references to Viennese thought and art—Freud, Mahler, Klimt—and the coming destruction of that golden culture is one of the tragedies of the play. Over whiskey, Hermann and his mathematician brother-in-law, Ludwig Jakobovicz (Brandon Uranowitz), argue about Hermann’s blithe disregard of Austrian anti-Semitism. Hermann is joining the Jockey Club and—a mathematician, you say? Your inner Stoppard gong should ring at that; this is the playwright who taught us chaos theory [Arcadia] and probability [Rosencrantz and Guildenstern]. When Ludwig later tries to demonstrate coördinate geometry using a cat’s cradle, we can see that one of Stoppard’s famous Knowledge Metaphors is twisting itself into view. And, indeed, like the knots on Ludwig’s cat’s-cradle string, family members change positions yet maintain their connection. By the bitter fifth act, set in 1955, there are huge differences between the destroyed families’ three lone revenants—an American émigrée, an Auschwitz survivor, and an English humorist who remembers nothing. They stand in an apartment that’s as bare as an abandoned lot. Nevertheless, they are cousins, still tied by the family string.

The armatures of Stoppard pieces are often other plays: “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” rests on “Hamlet”; “Travesties” travesties “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Here, his vision of Vienna borrows from the provocative turn-of-the-century Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler (Freud called him his “psychic twin”), whose work Stoppard has adapted several times. In the 1900 section, he reworks elements from “Dalliance,” his own adaptation of Schnitzler’s cynical “Liebelei”—again, there’s a cavalier dragoon named Fritz having an affair (this time with Gretl) and the threat of a duel. “Leopoldstadt” makes reference to another Schnitzler play, “Reigen” [usually translated as La Ronde] in the course of the action, and begins to echo its structure, with two-character scenes linked in a daisy chain: Hanna and Gretl, Gretl and the dragoon, the dragoon and Hermann. Stoppard uses content and structure to point to a playwright whom many in the audience will not know, and even this unknowing is important. Stoppard’s subject, after all, is forgetting.

The 1924 act shifts its tone, borrowing from [Noël] Coward and [P. G.] Wodehouse, and is animated by both the Charleston and a farcical misunderstanding. The families gather for a baby’s circumcision, and a Gentile banker is mistaken for the mohel [the person who performs the circumcision in a Jewish bris]. (Hermann: “What are you talking about?” Grandma: “Foreskins!”) Some in this generation bear the wounds of the First World War, but these are largely ignored in favor of the new baby, the new dance craze. A [Gustav] Klimt portrait of Gretl in a green shawl hangs above the sideboard; beneath it, her niece Nellie is sewing a red flag, a symbol of the socialist movement that will be a pretext for yet more anti-Semitic vitriol. Swiftly, though, we’re on to the next act. In 1938, both green shawl (art) and red flag (politics) will disappear, trampled by the Reich’s jackboots.  [The Anschluss—Germany’s annexation of Austria—took place on 13 March 1938.]

Stoppard has described his writing as a “series of small, large, and microscopic ambushes,” and there’s a quality of intentional frustration here—dramatic plots crowd in and break off, and key confrontations remain offstage, experienced mainly in retrospect. What happens with Hermann and the dragoon? Or Nellie’s march for the workers? You might find out, but by the time you do there’ll be a Nazi pounding on the door.

Stoppard has always believed in creating difficulty for his audiences, writing intellectual high-wire acts (“Jumpers,” “The Invention of Love”) and idea-in-action masterpieces (“Rock ’n’ Roll,” “Arcadia,” “The Real Thing”). In these plays, dazzling flights of language manage to make us think and feel simultaneously, to experience both sorts of internal action. Here, though, the challenge lies in keeping the narratives straight, and that difficulty crowds out conceptual engagement and emotional connection. It deprives us of the crucial Stoppardian pleasure, the opportunity to think in real time alongside a mental acrobat.

Could this be deliberate? Is Stoppard snatching away the expected, fictional climaxes in order to point to the “real” grief of the last scene? Certainly, the final moment is wrenching: the audience gasps with tears as the survivors tell their English cousin (who knows as little as the young Stoppard did) what happened to each old man and sweet child. But the drama’s other emotional currents simply haven’t registered. In his rush to cram so much into abbreviated scenes, Stoppard veers toward self-parody, particularly when Ludwig talks about math like a character aware that he’s speaking the theme of the play. The writer’s many gifts do not include compression on this scale. His orchestration is off; in all the hurry, we cannot hear the motifs when we need to, or the individual voices.

The staging is at least partly to blame. The director, Patrick Marber, has imported his production from the U.K., and his mostly new, mostly American cast has, for some reason, been told to speak with a British accent. (In London, that was the neutral choice—on Broadway, it seems affected.) Perhaps out of nervousness about audibility, Marber has his performers stay far apart and yell their lines from opposite sides of the stage; Hermann and Ludwig, in their first conversation, sound as intimate as two guys trying to park a semi. People must rapidly communicate their backstories (Why am I missing this eye? Where did my first husband go?) amid the clamor of other characters, and this just leads to more shouting. Uranowitz is the only one who goes big but maintains his precision; Castelow resists the melodramatic tide, much to her credit. There is, at least, a prettily staged Passover Seder: the lighting designer Neil Austin bathes the scene in a deep, resinous glow, a moment preserved in amber.

As I watched the play, I couldn’t work out why so much of it left me unmoved, and it was only afterward that I began to follow its bread crumbs into the dark. For instance, why is the play called “Leopoldstadt”? The word refers to the old Jewish quarter of Vienna, but the Merz apartment isn’t situated there. I can think of two reasons. One is that the Stoppard stand-in is called Leopold (changed to the more English Leonard), and this play’s gilt-and-black Vienna is the “stadt” of his lost memory, a city he will need to either rebuild or abandon. The other possibility is that we’re meant to wonder. If we look it up, we learn that the sector was named for King Leopold, the Holy Roman Emperor who expelled Austria’s Jews, in 1670. Of course, the tides shifted, and Jewish families returned a few decades later. They flowed back into a neighborhood now named for their tormentor, setting up house in the ashes of the pogrom.

In the end, much of what I found moving about “Leopoldstadt” was not onstage. Instead, it came in the reading that the play persuades you to do, and in the memories of those other Stoppard pieces, which waltz and curtsy in the mind. The show sent me to read [Kenneth] Tynan and James and [Hermione, I presume] Lee; it sent me to those beautiful interviews with the man himself. Stoppard’s frequent collaborator Carey Perloff recently published “Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View” [Methuen Drama, 2022], and she spends a chapter discussing his not quite forgotten, always sort of known Jewishness, the way it emerged in past work as stories about doubles and twins, or heritage that is torn down and lost. Her book helped me think about where Stoppard’s experience surfaces in Hermann, a man who both knows and does not know his true situation, a man who thinks he has won the coin toss while the coin is still in the air.

The more you learn, the more you feel. (That might be a central tenet of Stoppardianism.) The particular lesson in “Leopoldstadt” is that we are responsible even for the things we do not know. Here is a play that strikes deepest if you understand its origin: a conversation in a café between Stoppard and a cousin he didn’t realize he had, while his mother sits at the other end of the table, upset that he is finding out the truth. You will have to seek out that story yourself, but at least it’s easy to find. Stoppard, notoriously, is a man who does the research. Why should his audience not have to do it, too?

[Helen Shaw joined the New Yorker as a staff writer in 2022. Previously, she was the theatre critic at New York magazine and also its culture vertical, Vulture. She has also written about theater and performance for 4Columns and Time Out New York and contributed to the New York Sun, American Theatre magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the Village Voice, Art in America, and Artforum. She was co-awarded the 2017-18 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.]

A Tribute to Charles Fuller (1939-2022)

 

[Playwright Charles Fuller died at 83 on 3 October 2022 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where he had lived since 1989.  He was best known for his 1981 work A Soldier’s Pay, for which he won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and which was adapted for the cinema in 1984 as A Soldier’s Story with a screenplay by Fuller.  The film was nominated for the 1985 Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.

[A Soldier’s Play was premièred Off-Broadway in 1981 by the Negro Ensemble Company of New York City, winning the 1982 Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play and the 1982 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play.  It was revived on Broadway in 2020 by the Roundabout Theatre Company and won the 2020 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play and the 2020 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play.

[I’m presenting the New York Times obituary of Fuller, published on 5 October 2022.  Then I’ll post an article from the production’s Showbill by Kathy Henderson, “A Soldier’s Play,” and a review of the début production.]

“CHARLES FULLER, 83, DIES; HIS PLAY WON A PULITZER”
by Neil Genzlinger 

He was the second Black playwright to win the award and later adapted the play into an Oscar-nominated film, “A Soldier’s Story.”

Charles Fuller, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982 for “A Soldier’s Play,” which finally made it to Broadway 38 years later, in a production that earned two Tony Awards, died on Monday in Toronto. He was 83.

His wife, Claire Prieto-Fuller, confirmed the death.

Mr. Fuller was only the second Black playwright to win the Pulitzer for drama. (Charles Edward Gordone won in 1970 for “No Place to Be Somebody.”) His plays often examined racism and sometimes drew on his background as an Army veteran. Both of those elements were evident in “A Soldier’s Play,” which was Mr. Fuller’s reimagining of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” and centered on the murder of a Black Army sergeant and the search for the culprit.

[No Place to Be Somebody premièred in the Susan Stein Shiva Theater of the New York Shakespeare Festival (now known as the Public Theater) on 4 May 1969 and ran for 250 performances until 7 December.

[It played a limited engagement at Broadway’s ANTA Playhouse (now the August Wilson Theatre) from 30 December 1969 to 10 January 1970, where it played 16 performances and won, in addition to the 1970 drama Pulitzer, two 1969 Drama Desk Awards, including Most Promising Playwright for Gordone, and a Theatre World Award.

[No Place returned to Off-Broadway on 20 January 1970 and ran at the Promenade Theatre on upper Broadway at 76th Street for 312 performances, closing on 18 October.]

The play was first staged in 1981 by the Negro Ensemble Company with a cast that included Denzel Washington. Frank Rich, in his review in The New York Times, called it “a relentless investigation into the complex, sometimes cryptic pathology of hate” and praised Mr. Fuller’s delineation of both the Black and the white characters.

“Mr. Fuller demands that his Black characters find the courage to break out of their suicidal, fratricidal cycle,” Mr. Rich wrote, “just as he demands that whites end the injustices that have locked his Black characters into the nightmare.”

Hollywood came calling. A 1984 film version, retitled “A Soldier’s Story” and directed by Norman Jewison, had a cast that included Mr. Washington, Howard E. Rollins Jr., David Alan Grier, Wings Hauser, Adolph Caesar and Patti LaBelle. It received three Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Fuller’s screenplay.

In “A Soldier’s Play” and his other works, Mr. Fuller strove to serve up not idealized Black characters but ones who reflected reality.

“In the ’60s and early ’70s, Black plays were directed at whites,” Mr. Fuller told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1984, when the Negro Ensemble Company’s production of “A Soldier’s Play” was staged in San Diego. “They were primarily confrontational pieces, whose major concern was to address racism and white-Black relationships in this country. Now we are much more concerned with examining ourselves, with looking at our own situations — historically in many instances. We are seeing characters who are more complex, ones who have bad qualities as well as good ones.”

“A Soldier’s Play,” he told The Times in 2020, drew in part on his upbringing in a tough neighborhood of North Philadelphia.

“I grew up in a project in a neighborhood where people shot each other, where gangs fought each other,” he said. “Not white people — Black people, where the idea of who was the best, toughest, was part of life. We have a history that’s different than a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t cheat on each other, kill each other, love each other, marry each other, do all that, things that, really, people anywhere in the world do.”

Charles H. Fuller Jr. was born on March 5, 1939, in Philadelphia. His father was a printer, and his mother, Lillian Teresa Fuller, was a homemaker and foster mother. He was a student at Roman Catholic High School in Philadelphia when he attended his first play, a production performed in Yiddish at the Walnut Street Theater.

“I didn’t understand a word,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1977, but somehow it sparked his interest in becoming a playwright.

He studied for two years at Villanova University and then joined the Army, where his postings included Japan and South Korea. After four years, he returned to Philadelphia, taking night classes at LaSalle College (now University) while working as a city housing inspector.

In 1968, he and some friends founded the Afro-American Arts Theater in Philadelphia, but they had no playwrights, so Mr. Fuller gave it a try.

One result was his first staged play, “The Village: A Party,” about a racially mixed utopia, which was produced in 1968 at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.

“What the evening proves,” Ernest Albrecht wrote in a review in The Home News of New Brunswick, N.J., “is that the theater is not Fuller’s bag.”

But Mr. Fuller kept at it. In the 1970s he relocated to New York, where the Negro Ensemble Company in 1974 staged his drama “In the Deepest Part of Sleep” and opened its 10th-anniversary season in 1976 with another of his plays, “The Brownsville Raid,” based on a 1906 incident in Texas in which Black soldiers were accused of a shooting. Walter Kerr, writing in The Times, praised Mr. Fuller for not making the play a simple story of racial injustice.

“Mr. Fuller is interested in human slipperiness, and his skill with self‐serving, only slightly shady evasions of duty helps turn the play into the interesting conundrum it is,” Mr. Kerr wrote.

Although he set out as a playwright to examine difficult questions, Mr. Fuller did so with a certain degree of optimism about the future of the United States.

“America has an opportunity, with all its technology, to develop the first sensible society in history,” he said in the 1977 interview with The Inquirer. “It could provide all its people with some rational way to live together while still glorying in their cultural diversity.”

By the late 1980s, though, he had tired of New York and moved to Toronto, where he was living at his death. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, David; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

“A Soldier’s Play” was finally produced on Broadway in 2020 by the Roundabout Theater with a cast that included Mr. Grier and Blair Underwood. It was eligible to win the best-revival Tony even though it had never been produced on Broadway previously — the more familiar prerequisite for the category — because, under Tony rules, it was by 2020 considered “a classic.” Mr. Grier himself won a Tony for best actor in a featured role in a play.

“It has been my greatest honor to perform his words on both stage and screen,” Mr. Grier said of Mr. Fuller on Twitter, adding that “his genius will be missed.”

[Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries desk. Previously he was a television, film, and theater critic.]

 *  *  *  *
BRIEF PLOT SYNOPSIS OF A SOLDIER’S PLAY 

At Fort Neal, a Louisiana army camp in 1944, Tech/Sergeant (the equivalent of today’s sergeant first class) Vernon C. Waters, the sergeant of a black company in the segregated army of the time, is walking back to the post from town after a night of drinking. 

Suddenly, he’s shot by an unseen gunman.  Captain Charles Taylor, the white company commander, thinks first that the murderer is a local Ku Klux Klansman.  Then the captain fears it might be a racist white officer.

Captain Richard Davenport, a black army lawyer, is sent by the Department of War (the predecessor of today’s Department of the Army) to investigate.  Taylor, worried that the assignment of a black investigator means the case will be swept under the rug, attempts to discourage Davenport.  

But Davenport perseveres, uncovering deep-seated hatred and corruption among the men in the company.  He discovers the killer was one of the black soldiers under Waters’s command.  The men hated the NCO because he treated Southern black men with contempt.  He singled out Private C. J. Memphis for special torment, driving him to suicide.  

Despite each soldier’s motive for the killing, Davenport eventually solves the case.  In doing so, he also unveils some deeply hidden feelings.

*  *  *  *
“A SOLDIER’S PLAY”
by Kathy Henderson 

It's all good news for this Pulitzer Prize winner

[This article ran in the Showbill of August 1982, “Theatre Four: Negro Ensemble Company” (the program booklet for A Soldier’s Play). 

[I saw the NEC production of A Soldier’s Play in August 1982, eight months after it opened at Theatre Four on West 55th Street in Manhattan, and four months before it closed to go on a 13-city U.S. tour.  There were a number of cast changes from the opening night company.

[A Soldier’s Play started previews at Theatre Four on 10 November 1981 and opened on 20 November.  It closed on 2 January 1983, a run of 468 performances.  In addition to the Pulitzer and the Drama Critics’ Circle Award, which both went to Fuller, and the Outer Critics’ Circle Award, which went to the play, the world première of A Soldier’s Play also garnered three other awards.

[The 1982 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play went to Adolph Caesar as Tech/Sergeant Vernon C. Waters and the 1982 Clarence Derwent Award for Most Promising Male Performer went to Larry Riley as Private C. J. Memphis.  The 1982 Obie Award for Distinguished Ensemble Performance went to Caesar, Riley, and Denzel Washington (Private First Class Melvin Peterson).]

Theatrical magic.  The hope of achieving it keeps artists at work; the hope of sharing it keeps audiences buying tickets.  When it happens, as it has with A Soldier’s Play, the magic seems so natural that everyone wonders why it is so rare.

Produced by the Negro Ensemble Company, A Soldier’s Play opened last November for a six-week run that shows no sign of ending.  Its author, Charles Fuller, won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for drama and has signed with Warner Brothers to write the screenplay, reportedly for $200,000 [worth about $615,000 in 2022].  A second company opens this month at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles [19 August-2 October 1982; West Coast première].

“It’s just been one high after another,” says cast member Brent Jennings [Private Tony Smalls], a sentiment echoed during a series of conversations with the Soldier’s Play actors.  Playwright Fuller, already at work on the movie script, added a few thoughts on the state of the theatre and the spoils of success.

[The film adaptation, A Soldier’s Story, was in production in Alabama, with Fuller’s screenplay directed by Norman Jewison, in September and November 1983.  It was released in New York City and Los Angeles on 14 September 1984 after premièring at the Toronto International Film Festival on the 13th.]

The soft-spoken Fuller wears his acclaim well.  He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two sons and shows no inclination to abandon the stage for Hollywood.  “Are you kidding?” he says mildly.  “Oh, my God, never.  Movies are another side of things, but writing for the theatre brings me the most joy.”

Actor Charles Brown, who appeared in the playwright’s first hit, The Brownsville Raid [first staged at the O’Neill Theatre Center, Waterford, Connecticut, in 1975; produced by NEC, December 1976-February 1977, directed by Israel Hicks], recalls the excitement he felt after reading A Soldier’s Play.  “I told myself this play was going to go all the way and win every award because it is a true American drama,” he says.  Brown, a Tony nominee in 1980 for [Samm-Art Williams’s] Home, plays Captain Richard Davenport, a lawyer sent to investigate the murder of a black sergeant at Fort Neal, La., in 1944. 

[NEC’s Home, directed by Dean Irby, débuted at the St. Mark's Playhouse in the East Village, December 1979-February 1980.  It transferred to Broadway’s Cort Theatre (now the James Earl Jones), May 1980-January 1981, with Douglas Turner Ward assuming the direction.  Brown was nominated for the Best Actor in a Play Tony and the Outstanding Actor in a Play Drama Desk Award.]

Although the actor (along with Adolph Caesar as the sergeant [Tech/Sergeant Vernon C. Waters]) has a large, central role, he points out that the playwright “has written complete parts for twelve people, and every member of the cast has a full moment to shine.”  The company’s ensemble work, which drew unanimous critical praise, was colorfully described in [New York City’s African-American newspaper,] the Amsterdam News: “They lined up all these dynamite, power-pack[ed] dudes, and under Douglas Turner Ward’s able hand, the thing went off like a firecracker.”

A pleased Charles Fuller says, “We set out to make a piece in which no one got lost.  The last time we had a black hit with as many people in it was The River Niger (1973).”  The actors, in turn, are aware of A Soldier’s Play’s value as a showcase.

[Joseph A. Walker’s River Niger was premièred by NEC in December 1972 under the direction of Douglas Turner Ward; it ran at the St. Mark’s Playhouse until March 1973 with a cast of 12 that included Ward, Roxie Roker, and Frances Foster.]

Steven Jones, terrific as the sergeant’s fawning flunky [Private James Wilkie], says, “I haven’t had much exposure, so this was a great opportunity.  Everyone in the city connected with the business has come to see it.”  Jones, who commutes on weekends to Washington, D.C., hopes the play will help hm get an agent and, eventually, move his family to New York.

Brent Jennings speaks plainly of what his small but pivotal role has meant: “I’ve been working from October to the present—that’s the longest I’ve ever been employed continuously on the stage in the seven years that I’ve been in New York.  It’s also been one of the nicest groups of people I’ve ever worked with.  No prima donnas, no tempers—everyone respects each other.”

Adds Eugene Lee [Corporal Bernard Cobb], a former schoolteacher who’s been in New York for a year and a half, “It’s a wonderful feeling to be working with pros like these people.  Now I feel like I’m an actor.”

A different perspective comes from Peter Friedman, whose character, a white captain [Captain Charles Taylor], does a lot of verbal sparring with the black investigator.  Though the part is first-rate, and so were his reviews, Friedman has gotten used to the fact that he’s in the background here.

“When people come from Hollywood and they need a black actor, they come immediately to see this show—but not people who need a white actor,” he says matter-of-factly.  “It’s the same with the audience.  Early on, it was about 99 percent black, and it was clear at the curtain call that they hadn’t come to watch the white experience.  Now the audience has evened off quite a bit, which makes it easier for me.

“I’m getting in miniature what black actors have gotten for years,” he points out, “being the outsider.  But when I leave the theatre after the show, it’s the black people who come up and look me in the eye and say ‘Wow.’  The white people can’t really look at me.  I think it’s embarrassing for a white person to identify with the bigotry.”

Whites aren’t the only bigots in A Soldier’s Play; much of the richness of the piece comes from its multifaceted examination of racism.  NEC Managing Director Leon Denmark comments, “Charles tackles difficult subject matter, shows several points of view without being didactic and gives you a good play at the same time.  That’s very difficult.

“The two words for Charles,” he goes on, “are honest and courageous.  To discuss the color problem that existed among blacks—light-skinned people lording it over darker-skinned people, this feeling of self-hatred that still affects black people today—that’s being very courageous.  A lot of black people will say he’s washing our dirty linen in public.  But his honesty about the subject, combined with skilled craft, saw him through.”

In typically modest fashion, the playwright remarks, “I’m not the sort who believes you can beat audiences over the head and say, ‘You must come see this.’  I must convince you that what I do is worth your attention.’

Fuller dismisses the suggestion that he is one of the few current dramatists dealing with serious issues.  “I really am not,” he says.  “I’m the only one who people have noticed lately.”  His voice rises in ridicule at “experts” who say nothing challenging is being written.  “Since theatre is a multiracial matter, it’s inconsistent and, finally, in bad taste to assume that Asians aren’t doing anything, that Puerto Ricans aren’t doing anything, that blacks aren’t doing anything.  It’s racist, quite frankly, and simple-minded.”

As he discusses the Soldier’s Play movie, Fuller muses about the money now coming his way, “Certainly I am reasonably secure, but I don’t have enough to do what I want.  I’d like to write films that I can also produce, support playwrights I’m interested in, do some things in television.”

[Aside from his screenplay for A Soldier’s Story, Fuller wrote teleplays for three TV movies and segments for two others: The Sky Is Gray (1980), A Gathering of Old Men (1987), Zooman (1995; from his 1980 play Zooman and the Sign), The Wall (1998; segment "The Badge"), Love Songs (1999; segments “A Love Song for Champ,” “A Love Song for Jean and Ellis,” “A Love Song for Dad”; also producer).

[In addition to the plays already named, Fuller’s earliest stage works are The Perfect Party (aka: The Village: A Party; 1968) and In the Deepest Part of Sleep (1974).  After A Soldier’s Play, the dramatist wrote the book for Urban Blight (1988), then Prince (1988), Sally (1988), and Burner’s Frolic (1990), all for NEC.  In 2013, he composed One Night . . ., which ran at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village.]

Steven Jones sums up the actors’ goals when he says, “I’d just like to keep my career moving on an upward angle.  But Peter Friedman has a more specific part in mind: “I can’t wait to play some sort of hippie screw-around who mumbles a lot and sits crumpled up instead of being ramrod straight and talking with perfect clarity.”

For now, though, he’s enjoying being part of the magic.  “Even though a whole week can go by when you feel like nothing creative has happened, all of a sudden you come on a whole new vein—it’ll be like getting on a jet plane and it will take you for a ride.”

[Kathy Henderson is a freelance entertainment writer, specializing in theater, who’s written for Playbill (which owned Showbill at the time of this publication), Variety, InTheater, Broadway.com, and other outlets.  (Showbill is similar to Playbill, but with a different mix of advertisers.)]

*  *  *  *
“CHARLES FULLER'S INCISIVE LOOK INTO ‘A SOLDIER'S PLAY’”
by Lionel Mitchell 

[This is the review of the première production of A Soldier’s Play at NEC from the New York Amsterdam News that Kathy Henderson quotes above.  Because of that and because I think it’ll be interesting to read what New York’s black newspaper thought when the play first came out on stage, I decided to run this notice.  (The critical reception for A Soldier’s Play, however, was pretty much unanimous.)  It was written by Lionel Mitchell and ran on 12 December 1981.]

Charles Fuller’s, “A Soldier’s Play,” is another of the works of high excellence that he seems perennially to turn out.  It is particularly fine in that it casts light upon an era that I have always felt seemed shrouded in near-total mystery: How did Black people fare in the decade I was born in — the nineteen forties?  Indeed, very little seems to have been written about that era.

Fuller has opened it up as never before.  (Larry Neal had tried to do this in his, “Glorious Monster in the Bell of the Horn,” but that piece failed upon the inability of the director to gain mastery over the material).  However, Fuller, with Douglas Turner Ward directing, has indeed succeeded in putting together a classic.  His play creates a mood that ought to recommend it highly to a 90-minute showing on Public TV, a Masterpiece Theatre or Playhouse 90-type of thing.

[Most readers are familiar with the PBS program Masterpiece Theatre (now known simply as Masterpiece).  Playhouse 90 was an anthology drama series that aired on CBS from 1956 to 1960.]

The time is 1944 — some two years after this writer was born, and the place setting is Fort Neal, Louisiana.  Sergeant Vernon C. Water[s], a Black career army-man from the old school, [is] an upward-looking Northerner who despises Southern Blacks.

I’ve been saying for a long time that there are these regional differences between Blacks but Fuller dramatically reveals the contempt which Northern Blacks felt for the homely, folksy types and how that leads to the murder of Sergeant Waters.

Charles Brown tears up the stage with Capt. Davenport, the first time a Negro Captain-lawyer is sent to investigate the death of a Negro NCO in a Southern military base,  Adolph Caesar wasn’t laying down on the job with the role of Sergeant Waters either, this was all some very fine high powered stuff.

Samuel L. Jackson was there too, along with Denzel Washington and James Pickens, Jr. and Larry Riley with his guitar-pickin’ self.  Boy, they lined up all these dynamite, power-packed dudes and under Douglas Turner Ward’s able hand, the thing went off like a firecracker.

Of special note is the deep probe into inter-Black relationships and how they are affected by the atmosphere of World War II; the gradual acceptance of Blacks to combat zones; the slow opening up of the Armed Services to Blacks which the press of the war on two fronts made inevitable.  This is done with a sensitive and keen understanding of the history of what was a crucial decade for Blacks in this century.

[Black units were first sent into combat in Europe during World War II in 1944 when the 92nd Infantry Division, known as the Buffalo Division, landed in Italy in July.  President Harry Truman (1884-1972; 33rd President of the United States: 1945-53) desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces in July 1948.  Full integration, however, would not occur until the Korean War (1950-53).]

Fuller’s play is a masterpiece and will prove one of the better works to have ever come from the Black Theatre Movement.

[Lionel Mitchell was a journalist, poet, novelist, memoirist, and playwright, who wrote for the East Village Other in the 1960s, where some of his poetry was also published occasionally, and reviewed theater for the Amsterdam News.  He was born in 1942 in a small town in Louisiana before coming to New York City and settling in the East Village, where he was a fixture until his death in 1984 from an AIDS-related illness.  His one known published book was an autobiographical novel, Traveling Light (Seaview Books, 1980).

[Mitchell reviewed A Soldier’s Play the month after it opened Off-Broadway.  By the time I saw it, there had been cast changes.  For the record, the role played by Adolph Caesar (T/Sgt. Waters) in the opening cast was played by Arthur French in August 1982; Samuel L. Jackson (Pvt. Henson), Robert Gossett; Larry Riley (Pvt. Memphis), David Alan Grier; Cotter Smith (Lt. Byrd), Dan Lutzky; and Denzel Washington (Pfc. Peterson), O. L. Duke.

[In the review above, Mitchell refers in passing to Larry Neal (b.1937), a playwright, critic, arts administrator, and “collaborator with Immamu Baraka [playwright formerly known as LeRoi Jones (1934-2014)] on several anthologies,” according to the Amsterdam News.  He was also Charles Fuller’s friend of 35 years at Neal’s death on 6 January 1981, a scant 10 months before A Soldier’s Play started performances.

[Barbara Lewis wrote briefly of Neal in “‘A Soldier’s ‘Play’ dedicated to Larry Neal” (Amsterdam News, 2 January 1982).  In a section sub-headed “Dedicated to Larry,” Lewis said:

“This particular play. ‘A Soldier’s Play,’” Fuller said sitting in a conference room of the NEC offices overlooking Duffy Square [the northwest quadrant of Times Square at 47th Street], “I dedicated to Larry Neal.  We grew up four doors from each other.  We went to the same high school in Philadelphia.  We started writing about the same time.  Larry wrote a play called [‘]Glorious Monster in the Bell of the Horn[’] (produced in the late 1970’s).  The chief character was Richard Davenport.  I made the Black lawyer, Capt. Davenport, a Larry Neal figure uncovering and solving the problem in Ft. Neal, Louisiana.  I made up the town.  I dealt with some of the same things that concerned Larry in his writing: Racial consciousness, the merging of the rhythmic and what we know about the technology of America.  We have to merge the law and the rhythmic.”

[Neal’s play Glorious Monster in the Bell of the Horn was presented by New York City’s New Federal Theater, under the direction of Glenda Dickerson, in July 1979.

[In the same interview, Fuller covered another interesting aspect of his play:

“Another thing I wanted to do was take an American classic and recast it.  I patterned Waters on Claggart, the evil figure in [Herman] Melville’s [‘]Billy Budd[’].  So often Black people are drawn as capable only of unpremeditated violence.  We are as devious as anyone else.  I no longer believe that Black people have innocence in this society.  We are not innocents abroad.”

[Aligning A Soldier’s Play with Billy Budd (published posthumously in 1924 in Britain and 1962 in the U.S.; dramatized by Louis O. Coxe and Robert H. Chapman in 1949, with a Broadway début in 1951) makes Private C. J. Memphis the pure-hearted seaman Billy, the object of Master-at-Arms Claggart’s hatred.]