'Here There Are Blueberries,' Part 5

 

Critical Reception (continued) 

[This is the final installment of my series on the Tectonic Theater Project’s latest verbatim play, Here There Are Blueberries, which is now playing at the New York Theatre Workshop.  Part 5 below is the second post covering the critical reception of the play, namely the New York City début.

[Part 1, which was the republication of the transcript of the 60 Minutes story of the inception of the play was posted on 26 May.  Parts 2 and 3 (29 May and 1 June) covered the play’s development over 17 years, and Part 4 was the first selection of reviews of productions (in Miami Beach; La Jolla, California; and Washington, D.C.). 

[As always, my recommendation is that readers who haven’t already read the first four parts of “Here There Are Blueberries” go back and pick them up before reading this last section.  Most of the people, things, and events mentioned in passing below are more fully identified and explained in the previous parts of the series.

[For the introduction to Part 4, I compiled the production history of the play.  I’m repeating it here for quick reference to the sequence through which Blueberries went to get to New York City.

[The New York City début of Blueberries started previews at the New York Theatre Workshop in Manhattan’s East Village on 17 April 2024 and opened on 13 May 2024.  It’s currently scheduled to run until 30 June (extended twice from 2 and 16 June).

[On 6 May 2024, the winners and finalists of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes were announced—the same day as this year’s Yom Hashoah, the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day.  Here There Are Blueberries had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.  On the Pulitzer site, the play is described as “An elegant and harrowing work of documentary theater that examines the provenance of a photo album from Auschwitz and probes the unsolvable mystery of how individuals can insist on normalcy while atrocity lurks outside the frame.”

[For the immediate future, at least three productions have been announced.  At present, first up will be the McCarter Theatre at Princeton University in New Jersey, with scheduled dates of 24 January-9 February 2025.  The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Arts in Beverly Hills, California, follows with a prospective run of 13-30 March 2025.  Then California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area has announced it will mount a production from 5 April to 11 May 2025.]

“THE CHILLING TRUTH PICTURED
IN ‘HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES’”
by Vinson Cunningham 

[In Part 4, I posted one review for each of the first three presentations of Blueberries (though the coverage of the Miami Beach performance wasn’t actually a review because there were none on the ’Net).  For the New York première, I had a wider choice, so I decided to select two, one of which was written by a reviewer with reservations about the play’s treatment of its subject.

[I’ll say more about that when I introduce the second review in Part 5.  Below is the New Yorker’s notice by Vinson Cunningham, posted the magazine’s website on 18 May 2024.  The review-writer raised some interesting points in his assessment of the productions (starting with his opening remarks), which, aside from his positive evaluation of the production, makes the notice well worth reading.]

Moisés Kaufman’s play dramatizes the discovery of a photo album of Nazis at leisure at Auschwitz, and the reckoning it provoked.

There’s something awful about a lost picture. Maybe it’s because of a disparity between your original hope and the result: you made the photograph because you intended to keep it, and now that intention—artistic, memorial, historical—is fugitive, on the run toward ends other than your own. The picture, gone forever, possibly revived by strange eyes, will never again mean quite what you thought it would.

“Here There Are Blueberries”—a new play at New York Theatre Workshop, conceived and directed by Moisés Kaufman and written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich—begins with the discovery of a well-curated album of photographs. It’s not just one misplaced dispatch from a former world but whole pasted-together pages of them, carefully arranged in order to tell a story. The album was found in the nineteen-forties, after the Second World War, by a man who describes himself, more than sixty years later, as an “87 year old retired U.S. Lieutenant Colonel.” It’s the early two-thousands, and he’s sent a letter to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The photographs are from Auschwitz.

“Blueberries” moves forward artfully, telling the true tale of the pictures and their march through public consciousness. The photographs show Nazis at ease at the site of the world’s most famous death machine. The Nazis lounge at a chalet, flirt with the secretarial pool, offer cheese smiles to the camera. None of the camp’s Jewish prisoners are pictured in the photographs, only their murderers, in the moments between murders. The album is a placid, subtly horrifying log of the mundane aspects of those people’s daily lives.

Rebecca Erbelding (Elizabeth Stahlmann), an archivist on whose desk the lieutenant colonel’s letter lands, recognizes the faces of notorious Nazis. There’s Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death, and Rudolf Höss, the administrative architect of Auschwitz, “responsible for everything we think of as the camp: the barracks, the electrified fences, the guard towers, the extermination infrastructure . . . the whole organization.” After some detective work, Rebecca discovers that the album was apparently created by an upwardly mobile functionary named Karl Höcker. He probably put it together in a triumphal mood, thinking that it would be behind-the-scenes evidence of a heroic victory. Later, in the war’s aftermath, having lost the thing, maybe he thought of it compulsively, hoping it stayed lost, wishing he could have set it ablaze. The pictures—thirty-two pages of them, a hundred and sixteen images in all—had escaped his intentions not once but twice (so far).

Kaufman’s staging of the play is noble but simple. Characters approach the lip of the stage and state their thinking plainly. Besides Rebecca, there’s the director of the museum’s photography collection, Judy Cohen (Kathleen Chalfant, a brilliant performer whose mere presence gives the proceedings a fitting gravity), and the museum’s director, Sara Bloomfield (Erika Rose). The lighting, designed by David Lander, is bright and clean, just how we imagine the back rooms of a great museum might look (the apt scenic design is by Derek McLane), except when it dims a bit, the better to illuminate a picture from the album. Sometimes the flexible ensemble (which also includes Scott Barrow, Nemuna Ceesay, Noah Keyishian, Jonathan Raviv, Anna Shafer, Charlie Thurston, and Grant James Varjas) acts out a scene from a photograph—playing an accordion, laughing like schoolchildren on an exhilarating trip.

This is an institutional saga, the story of how a memorial museum—meant to honor and dramatize the lives of victims, not the idle pleasures of their captors—learned to metabolize Höcker’s difficult artifact. The play is based on real interviews conducted by Kaufman and Gronich, a documentary technique that Kaufman also employed for “The Laramie Project,” his renowned play about the death of Matthew Shepard. That method matches the art form that is this play’s spur: photography. Just like an interview, a photograph is a quivering, ambivalent, sometimes deceptive form of evidence, especially when the photographer is an amateur. You can suss out mood and tone, discern planetary facts like weather and time of day. But the spaces between exposures, before and after the questioning begins—who knows?

Even as “Blueberries” went about its business—it has the often dutiful tone of a high-quality PBS docuseries—I kept thinking about the lieutenant colonel who held on to the album for so many years, whose story the play must reasonably sweep past on the way to its forensics. In his initial letter to the museum, he says that he was sent to Germany to “do some work for the government.” What that work was he doesn’t specify. “While there,” he says, “I was housed in an abandoned apartment where I found a photo album. I salvaged the album and have kept it in my archives now for over sixty years.”

Sixty years! One wonders who, if anybody, he told of the record of horror living with him like a roommate in his home. How often did he look at it? How perfectly, over that span, had he memorized its faces, whether or not he was able—without a museum’s resources—to assign them any names? Why keep it for so long? What had he been thinking, at the outset and then for those many decades? That unknowable mystery, about the allure of evil and the power of photography, is sometimes captured by this play and sometimes not—a casualty, perhaps, of its fealty to pure fact.

One central concern of the play—what it means to look at the mundane when, somewhere just beyond the frame, there’s a massacre afoot—makes it a kind of companion piece to “The Zone of Interest,” the recent Oscar-winning film by Jonathan Glazer, very loosely adapted from the novel by Martin Amis. The movie tracks the home life of Rudolf Höss, the administrator who, with his distinct high-and-tight haircut, slick and floppy up top, recurs throughout the Höcker album. “The Zone of Interest” uses sound design—the crackle of flame, cries coming from invisible mouths—to create an underhum of terror, to make an unseen context the whole point of the domesticity that shows up onscreen. “Blueberries” makes that irony a clear pain point. The museum’s staff worry about showing the photographs, but eventually, and rightly, decide that there’s no way not to. To understand sickness like this, you need to see how the perpetrators are—in more ways than you might like—just like you.

Blood underpaints today’s world, too, no matter how many lovelier colors fill our normal days. You go about your business; attend meetings on Zoom or at some office; ride the subway and watch the faces, with their plural origins, blur past; take walks through the warming spring air, admiring the onrushing green. Now and again, you look down at your phone, and here come the images: a bloody limb, a shell-shocked parent, a dead child caked in rubble and dust. Photographic evidence, the irrefutable cinematography of the smartphone amid emergency, death in vivid hue: this is how we know that things are wrong.

There is no leisure in these newer images, no blueberries and cream eaten by smiling accessories to a heinous passage in history—just the news, seemingly simultaneous with its happening. I sometimes wonder if these images and videos, for now fleeting on screens, illustrations on a scrollable feed, will one day adorn the walls of museums, or whichever repositories the people of the future choose for the display of their collective glories and great shames.

Auschwitz and the other camps whose names haunt our textbooks were mysteries to outsiders—this was part of their power. It took so many efforts of reconstruction like the one dramatized by “Here There Are Blueberries” just to know, belatedly, what exactly went on. Photography will also be part of the story of today’s traumas, but in a very different way. We won’t be able to say we didn’t see.

[Vinson Cunningham is a theater reviewer for the New Yorker.  His début novel, Great Expectations, came out in March 2024.]

*  *  *  *
“HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES 
KEEPS THIS MOMENT AT ARM’S LENGTH”
by Sara Holdren 

[Sara Holdren’s review of Blueberries was published on Vulture, the online platform for New York magazine, on 14 May 2024.  Holdren was one of few reviewers who had some negative criticism of the play, both in New York City and beyond, though she, like her like-minded journalists, had almost universal praise for the production itself.

[There weren’t many who articulated reservations about Kaufman and Gronich’s handling of the revelations and truths in the Auschwitz photos.  The few that did were remarkably similar to one another—as, in fact, were the assessments of the writers who had nothing but praise for both the play and the production.]

As powerful as this Pulitzer-finalist play about Auschwitz is, it studiously avoids the conversation people are having right now.

Moisés Kaufman first saw the photographs that prompted the creation of Here There Are Blueberries in 2007. He first contacted Rebecca Erbelding, the archivist and historian who brought the photos to light, in 2010. The play — a documentary-style piece grappling with the images, which give a Nazi’s-eye view of Auschwitz — was written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich and developed by Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project over more than a decade, building on research, interviews, and the company’s signature devising process of “moment work.” [Both “devising” and “Moment Work” are defined in the introductions to Parts 2 and 3.] After premiering at La Jolla in 2022, it went to D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, just a short walk across the National Mall from the Holocaust Memorial Museum, where Erbelding works and where the photos live in the archives; more recently, during its previews at New York Theatre Workshop, the play became a Pulitzer finalist. There’s nothing hasty about Here There Are Blueberries — it has been built, piece by deliberately laid piece, over years, and its run at NYTW comes augmented with a whole series of talk-backs and scrupulously planned postshow discussions.

And yet, at least in my experience of the show, there’s the hovering sensation of something not being addressed. Here we are, at the theater where the playwright Victor I. Cazares launched a personal strike declaring that they would stop taking their HIV meds until their onetime “artistic home” called for a ceasefire in Gaza (NYTW never did; artistic director Patricia McGregor responded with this letter). And here we are at the end of a theatrical season that has felt particularly crowded — even by the standards of the form, which is always pretty present in New York — with Holocaust plays. A show both can and cannot help the moment it lands in. Development processes take months, or, as with Blueberries, years. But even the most slapdash productions don’t go up in the same world in which they were conceived. Every play, and every team of artists, owes something to itself: Are we telling the story we set out to tell? And, to some degree, to the context in which it finds itself: What does this story, whatever our original intentions, mean now? By avoiding any clear allusion to Gaza, not even a nod in its copious program materials, Here There Are Blueberries provokes a nagging feeling of double vision. Through one eye, you’re watching an earnest, solidly crafted show in which a group of fine actors dissects a fascinating and appalling historical artifact. Through the other, you’re watching a production, a theater, and a theater world that, on the whole, still somehow can’t bring itself to make its parallels explicit — to say out loud, That was an atrocity and so is this. A genocide happened then, and one is happening now. Cease fire.

Angering theatergoers has to be okay, has to be something we stop fearing. Comparison is beyond fraught when it comes to the Holocaust, but the truth is that comparison — which, counter to some arguments, is not necessarily diminishment — is already implicit in every piece of historical theater. We are presented with lenses through which to witness our own moment. Events, no matter how monumental or horrific, become points of reflection, whether or not we are willing to reflect.

What’s striking is that Here There Are Blueberries knows as much. Its protagonist — the rich-voiced Elizabeth Stahlmann’s thoughtful evocation of Erbelding — repeatedly pauses to ask herself, “What would I have done?” or “Who are we in the story?” Erbelding is guiding us through the Höcker Album, a collection of photographs that a retired U.S. lieutenant colonel brought to her attention in late 2006. Taken by Karl Höcker, adjutant to the Nazi commandant Richard Baer, the photos depict day-to-day life at Auschwitz as experienced by the camp’s officers and communications staff (women known as Helferinnen, who worked the switchboards). There are casual lunches and staff outings, people relaxing in lawn chairs, playing the accordion, laughing in the rain, eating blueberries. There isn’t a single prisoner in the 116 images. Like Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, the Höcker Album horrifies through its sunlit mundanity, its blithe — and, in this case, indisputably factual — representation of mass murderers and their accomplices not as monsters but as smiling, pie-faced family men and rosy-cheeked young women. “​​A bank clerk, a sweet-maker, an accountant,” says the curator Paul Salmons (Scott Barrow), listing the prewar professions of Höcker (also embodied by Barrow); his boss, Baer; and Josef Kramer, who ran the extermination center at Birkenau. In the face of such a document, the credo “Never again” becomes not simply a call to resist authoritarianism, or even to be awake to the continued scourge of antisemitism, but a warning to ourselves about ourselves: See how easy it is to live as if you and those closest to you are the only actual human beings in the world?

Zadie Smith wrote recently, and with much ensuing ire, about “that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place” where public intellectuals, and surely plenty of private citizens, feel pressured to plant a “rhetorical flag” regarding Palestine and Israel. In my own way, so did I. I sympathize with Smith’s addiction to humanism — in the brutal, reductive currents of the world, I too find myself clinging to complexity and nuance as a life raft. But why should that raft become a shield or a mask? Why should a belief that people are people, that history is a thousand-thread knot, and that words are highly imperfect tools stop us from saying and doing all we can in the service of what’s right? As it stands, “all we can” too often feels like next to nothing, yet still we hesitate. Is an individual play, artist, or institution responsible for making clear public statements beyond the broader template of values expressed in their work? I don’t know the answer, or whether it’s an answer that is always the same, one moment to the next — I suspect not. I suspect that, sometimes, invisible thresholds are crossed, and beyond these shifting lines, not speaking becomes in itself a kind of speech.

This is why Here There Are Blueberries is one play in an artistic vacuum and another in, well, the world. Part of the problem is that, in plays that take us where Kaufman and Gronich’s does, we’re dealing with content that both is and is not metaphor. One viewer will see the Höcker photos — and those from the Auschwitz Album, which stand in sickening contrast to Höcker’s — and will hear Holocaust historian Stefan Hördler (Nemuna Ceesay) talk about how “for the Nazis, the whole process of killing people [was] about dividing responsibilities”; or she will listen to Stahlmann, speaking in the person of Holocaust survivor Lili Jacob about being torn from her family, all of whom were murdered, and she — this viewer — will think, We are doing it again. Destroying families, killing children, and spreading the complicity as thin as we can to decrease the sting. Another viewer will see and hear all the same images and words and will think, This event stands alone and always will, and this is exactly why Israel needs to exist and to defend itself. 

The show makes space for both these audience members and those in between, and perhaps this is precisely what it wants to do; some may even argue that such multi-partisan inclusivity is one of theater’s key jobs. But I am hesitant about the number of productions I have seen this year alone that, in their retreading of our shared history, seem to be offering their audiences not so much an opportunity for hard reflection and possible change of mind as for confirmation of the mind-set they walked in with. When, in his much-misunderstood Oscars speech, Jonathan Glazer addressed the “dehumanization” of both “the victims of October 7 in Israel” and of “the ongoing attack in Gaza,” he expressed the pain of having “Jewishness and the Holocaust [be] hijacked by an occupation.” What’s happening now is that with each new production that returns us to these subjects and these places without some kind of defiance of Zadie Smith-ian remove, this hijacking is being allowed to continue. Though Kaufman and Gronich still have their responsibility to their own process and story in its more contained, theatrical sense, there must exist more possibilities than persisting in keeping that story’s current resonances so pointedly limited. It’s not about radical rewrites — a statement in the program, a gesture from the stage, a coda of some kind, one postshow discussion that mentions Gaza? Surely, this is a different play than the one that opened at La Jolla in 2022; surely, the behind-the-scenes conversations have been frequent, long, and difficult. Why not bring more of that difference and difficulty to the stage?

It’s a shame not just in this broader sense but in a more finely focused one that Here There Are Blueberries is haunted by an aura of contextual diffidence because so much that’s compelling is happening in the production. Derek McLane’s set design riffs on the layout and equipment of an archival-research lab, and its fluid interaction with David Bengali’s projections creates an eerily elegant backdrop for the Höcker Album’s procession of calm, awful images. Stahlmann, Ceesay, Barrow, and the rest of the ensemble (including the wonderful Kathleen Chalfant as Erbelding’s supervisor, Judy Cohen) never overgild or sentimentalize their many parts, and in a few striking moments, they bring the photos to life with jolts of terrible energy. “Rain from a clear sky,” reads the translation of one picture’s caption: We see a series of photos of the Helferinnen posing with Höcker, their grinning boss; thunder claps, and then the candids show the group scattering in a surprise summer downpour. Beneath the looming projected images, the women in the cast stand in a line, giggling and shrieking with delight.

“Feigling,” says Heinz Baumkötter (one of the Nazi officers in the photos, played with square-shouldered inscrutability by Ceesay). “Maybe I was . . . Feigling. A coward. Maybe I was a coward at times, and for this reason, I didn’t do what I should’ve done.” It’s something Baumkötter’s grandson, Tilman Taube (played by Jonathan Raviv), remembers him saying, and of all the words spoken in Here There Are Blueberries by figures portrayed in the Höcker Album, these feel the most honest, the least self-protective — the easiest, and most frighteningly so, to locate within one’s own soul. They raise the same question that lurks in the silent gap where this and so many projects and institutions, whether consciously or not, draw the line of their current political engagement: What are we so afraid of?

Here There Are Blueberries is at New York Theatre Workshop through June 16 [extended to 30 June].

[Sara Holdren is a director (As You Like It, Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival; Three Sisters, Two River Theater), teacher (NYU Graduate Acting Program, SUNY Purchase, Atlantic Acting School), and theater writer.  She’s originally from the Blue Ridge foothills outside of Charlottesville, Virginia.  

[Holdren’s the theater critic for New York magazine and Vulture.com and she’s a Drama League Fellow as well as the recipient of the 2016-2017 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.  She has a BA in Theater from Yale University and an MFA in Directing from Yale School of Drama and is a graduate of the Acting Shakespeare Program at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.]

Noh Theater of Japan

 

[I’ve posted a number of pieces about Kabuki, the dynamic traditional theater form of Japan, on Rick On Theater.  (See, for example, “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams” [1 November 2010]; “Grand Kabuki (July 1985)” [6 November 2010]; “Two Kabuki Reviews (2014)” [20 January 2018]; “‘Kabuki: Inside the Japanese Artform with its Biggest Star, Ebizo’” by Jon Wertheim [1 May 2020]; “‘The Ancient Art of Kabuki Made New, With Computer Animation’” by Micheline Maynard in “Computers and Actors, Part 1” [4 October 2021].)   

[I’ve even posted one article on the ancient performance form Gigaku (26 July 2011); but I haven’t run anything on Noh (14th century), which is older than Kabuki (17th century) and younger than Gigaku (7th century).

[On a recent Sunday, the New York Times published an interesting piece on a new movement in Japan concerning the making of Noh masks in the paper’s T Magazine, its periodic style publication.  The report, Hannah Kirshner’s “A New Face,” is short, and it doesn’t say anything about the theater form itself, so I decided an introduction to Noh was in order.

[The name Noh (sometimes written ‘Nō’) is probably familiar with most readers, but I suspect most Westerners are unfamiliar with the theater form itself.  So, before I present Kirshner’s report on the modern-day take on Noh masks, here’s a brief history and description of this classic drama.]

Noh is a Japanese classic theater form involving music, dance, and drama, originating in the 14th century.  It was developed together with Kyogen, which are comical pieces performed during interludes of the main Noh performance.  The dual art of Noh and Kyogen is known as Nohgaku, and has been designated an Intangible Cultural Heritage by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Noh, as we know it today, was popularized and formalized by a dramatist named Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1444) during the Muromachi Period (1333-1573).  Of the known 240 Noh plays in the current repertoire, Zeami wrote 100, and he codified the acting and production techniques in use today (1400-33; On the Art of the No Drama [Princeton University Press, 1984]).

It was Zeami's work that attracted the government's patronage of the art form.  Zeami later fell out of favor with the government and was banished to Sado Island.  Four main Noh troupes were subsequently established, receiving sponsorship from shrines and temples.

During the Tokugawa Period (1603-1867), the shogunate, the administration of the supreme military commander (shogun) of feudal Japan, made Noh its official ceremonial art and issued regulations for its governance.  Noh thus became increasingly standardized, with an emphasis on tradition rather than innovation.  A fifth troupe was added during this time, making five main Noh troupes which survive and perform till this day.

Noh theater is structured around song and dance.  The movement is slow and stately, the language is poetic (and spoken in a highly stylized form of 14th-century lyric Japanese that few modern spectators can understand), and it’s sung in a monotone.  

The name ‘Noh’ means ‘skill,’ ‘talent,’ or ‘to accomplish something.’  Zeami used the term ‘elegant imitation.’  When executed with excellence, the result is the experience of yugen, or ‘supreme beauty.’  This is the ultimate goal of the Noh performer. 

The rich, elaborate, and heavy costumes consist of multiple layers and textures that create an effect of resplendent elegance but also a bulky, massive figure.  Expressiveness is enhanced by props, most notably a folding fan.  Closed, partly closed, or open, the fan may represent any object as suggested by its shape and handling, for example a dagger or a lantern.

Plots are usually drawn from legend, history, literature (primarily Japanese or Chinese classical poetry and Zen Buddhist verses), and contemporary events of the era.  Themes often relate to dreams, supernatural worlds, ghosts, and spirits.

Noh plots are essentially dance-dramas, not concerned with dramatic action.  The plays seek to explore the essence of a situation or emotion in lyrical form.  All Noh plays reach fulfillment in dance.

Noh is performed on a square stage with a roof which is supported at its four corners by pillars.  The stage, made of planks, is hollow and resounds like a drum which the actors can use for sound effects.  All sides of the stage are open except for the back which consists of a wall with a painted image of a pine tree; in addition to no walls, there’s also no curtain to separate the audience from the performance space.  (All Noh stages are virtually identical.  Even the dimensions are standardized.) 

A bridgeway (hashigakari) runs at an oblique angle off the rear left corner (i.e., “up right” in western theater jargon) of the stage (to a small structure that serves as the “wings” of a western theater) for performers to enter and exit.  Noh used to be typically staged outdoors, but modern indoor theaters have also now become a common venue.

All performers in Noh are traditionally male (though that tradition is being successfully challenged more and more).  The roles are traditional and codified:

•   shite – the leading player.  Depending on the play, the shite (pronounced shi-TAY) may act as a holy old man, a deity, a demon, a spirit, or a living man or woman.  His movements express various moods.  (The shite is the only performer who wears a mask.)

•   waki – the supporting actor.  The waki plays roles such as a priest, monk, or samurai.  In contrast to the shite, the waki always portrays living people.

•   jiutai – the chorus.  The chorus of eight to ten people, including the chorus leader, sits stage left (i.e., the right of the stage from the perspective of the spectator) and assists the shite in the narration of the story.  (Unlike the chorus of a Greek classic play, the jiutai doesn’t enter the action on stage.)

•   hayashi – the orchestra.  Four musicians provide accompaniment for the performance with a flute (fue), shoulder drum (kotsuzumi), hip drum (otsuzumi) and stick drum (taiko).  They sit upstage, at the rear of the platform.

•   koken – stage attendants.  Dressed in black (to indicate they are unseen), the stage attendants are not part of the play but assist the performers in various ways, such as handing them props or adjusting their costumes.

The cast of a Noh play is a minimum of two (the shite and the waki), which is the usual, to up to six, plus the chorus and musicians. 

The roles each actor may play are rigidly conventional, unlike in western theater.  A waki one night can’t play a shite’s part the next, and a shite wouldn’t play a waki’s role in another production.  Training starts at around age three and it takes decades for a Noh actor to move up the ranks.

A Noh play generally runs around 60-90 minutes, some divided into two acts, and a Kyogen play lasts for around 15-30 minutes.  Traditionally, a Noh program includes three to five plays, one from each of several different categories of styles.  

Each play is separated from the next by a Kyogen, usually a comic version or parody of the main Noh play, making a total performance of between 3:45 and 10:00 hours (though probably more like 4-5 hours; spectators would come and go and bring food and drink).  Modern Noh performances, with fewer plays, are considerably shorter.

The lines of the play preceding the climactic dance establish the circumstances which motivate it.  The jiutai sings the narration of the shite’s dance-story; the hayashi furnishes a musical setting and establishes the timing of the shite’s gestures.  The dancer’s every movement of his hands and feet follows set rules.

Each gesture, each pose, each movement, each vocal inflection, each musical sequence has a specific meaning.  (These codified performance techniques, passed on from generation to generation, are called kata.)  The actors and musicians must learn these and execute them precisely, and devoted Noh fans understand them as if they were speech.

One key element of Noh are the masks which the shite wears.  They tell the audience what kind of character is being portrayed.  Some masks are general characters who may appear in many plays, while others are specific and are used in only one or two plays.  Frequently used masks represent demons and spirits, as well as women and men of various ages.  

The masks, which cover only the actor’s face, are carved from blocks of Japanese cypress.  Their three-dimensional properties allow skilled actors to evince a variety of expressions with changes in head orientation.  Some Noh masks, for example, are so carefully designed that the face smiles cheerfully when the actor looks up and takes on a dark, melancholy expression when the actor looks down. 

The masks are as codified as the actor’s kata.  The traditional mask-maker (unlike the ones in the article that follows), who’s an artist as well as a craftsman, can make only the subtlest modifications to the face, but master mask-makers have more leeway to do so than an apprentice.  Like the actors and the musicians, mask-makers have their traditions that are passed on to the next generations.

                     

— Pat Byrnes, New Yorker 29 Oct. 2001 

 “A NEW FACE”
by Hannah Kirshner

[Below is Kirshner’s New York Times report on the recent development in Noh mask-making (T Magazine 26 March 2023).  It’s also available online as “MAKING IT: The Female Artisans Honoring, and Reinventing, Japanese Noh Masks” (The Female Artisans Honoring, and Reinventing, Japanese Noh Masks - The New York Times (nytimes.com)).  There are several nice photo illustrations by Bon Duke, which I didn’t reproduce for ROT.]

Both honoring and departing from the tradition of Japanese Noh masks making, women are expanding its possibilities.

One of the world’s oldest surviving theatrical arts, Japanese Noh grew out of various forms of popular entertainment at temples, shrines and festivals, including seasonal rites offered by villagers giving thanks for a bountiful harvest. During the Muromachi period (1336-1573), those varied productions were codified into an elaborately contrived entertainment for military leaders, some of whom, like the 16th-century warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, also acted in Noh. Presented using minimal props on a stage comprising a roof, four pillars and a bridge way, the plays dramatize myths and tales from traditional Japanese literature with monologues, sparse bamboo flute melodies, periodic percussion and tonal chanting. Often, supernatural beings take human form. The pace can be almost hypnotically slow, with the colors and elaborate embroidery of the actors’ costumes indicating their characters’ age and status.

But perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Noh is the carved masks worn by performers. Of the hundreds of masks produced during the Muromachi period, about 40 to 50 form the archetypes for the masks made today, says the historian Eric Rath, who specializes in premodern Japan; many represent different characters, depending on the play. Master mask carvers have long been celebrated for their ability to create a static face that seems to come alive, its expression changing with the angle of the performer’s head and the way the light hits its features. While many Japanese people today have never seen a live Noh performance, the white visage and red lips of a Ko-omote mask (one of a few denoting a young woman) or the bulging golden eyes of the horned Hannya (one of the most famous of the demon masks, representing a wrathful, jealous woman) are both intrinsic to Japan’s visual culture.

Before World War II, only men were allowed to perform Noh professionally; now, some women play leading roles. But until recently, mask making, in which blocks of hinoki cypress carved in high relief are hollowed out, then primed with a white mixture of crushed oyster shells and animal glue -- with mineral pigment for lips and cheeks, and gold powder or copper to give the teeth and eyes of masks depicting supernatural beings an otherworldly glow -- was a craft largely handed down from father to son.

That’s changed somewhat in the years since the Kyoto-based Mitsue Nakamura, 76, started learning the craft in the 1980s. When she began, she knew of only one other woman in the field, but this year, all four of her current apprentices, some of whom study for as long as 10 years, are female. Some adhere to the traditional archetypes and techniques, while others radically reinterpret them.

For purists, Nakamura says, a true Noh mask is never entirely decorative: It has to be used onstage, and its maker must hew precisely to a narrow set of centuries-old parameters. Today, Nakamura says, actors prize masks that are antiques or appear to be. Her pieces, each of which takes about a month to complete, often look older than they are thanks to the shadows she smudges into the contours of the face, or a weathering she achieves by scratching the paint with bamboo.

In 2018, the Kanagawa-based playwright and screenwriter Lilico Aso, 48, came to see Nakamura’s process firsthand because she was interested in developing a character who was a Noh mask carver; instead, she became a mask carver herself, drawn, she says, to the idea of being “both a craftsman and an artist.” She’s been studying with Nakamura ever since and, last fall, in a show titled “Noh Mask Maker Mitsue Nakamura and Her Four Disciples” at Tokyo’s Tanaka Yaesu gallery, she exhibited a series of four masks called “Time Capsule” inspired by celebrities and fictional characters. Rihanna became an earth goddess with pearlescent blue lips and eye shadow. Ariana Grande morphed into the moon princess Kaguya, who, in an ancient tale, rejects all her mortal suitors and returns to her lunar home; in Aso’s rendering, she has the high, soft eyebrows of a Noh beauty.

For some female Noh artisans, subtle changes to traditional forms emerge from a deep personal connection. Keiko Udaka, 43, who also works in Kyoto, grew up steeped in Noh, with a father who was both a performer and a mask maker. She began studying with him when she was a teenager; in 2021, after he died, she took over an unfinished Noh play he was working on, commissioned by a town in Ehime prefecture, on the island of Shikoku. While one of her brothers completed the script, Udaka created a mask for the main character, a folk hero who starved to death while cultivating barley for future generations, imbuing it with the features of their late father. Such homages aren’t an uncommon practice among Noh artisans, and the allure is obvious: As Udaka says, a painstakingly crafted carving is more indelible than a photo. “Memories can be recorded too easily in many places now,” she says, “and they don’t remain in our minds.”

While Udaka’s departures from tradition are subtle, those of the Tokyo-based Shuko Nakamura (no relation to the Kyoto mask maker), 34, are unignorable. Inspired by Noh history, folklore and her own imagination, she makes masks out of modeling clay and paper rather than wood. One mask depicts an old woman, a crown of blue-black crows circling above her forlorn face, alluding to the ubasute story -- which appears in both folk tales and Noh -- of an elderly family member abandoned in the forest. With deep smile lines, a long horsehair beard and bushy pompom eyebrows, another mask honors the form of Okina, a spirit who appears as an old man. A gnarled pine tree sprouts from the mask’s head in place of hair; at the roots nestle a pair of turtles. The conifers and reptiles, she says, are references to the characteristic illustrations on the fan Okina holds when he dances.

[Ubasute (‘abandoning an old woman’) is a mythical practice whereby an infirm or elderly relative is carried to some remote, desolate place, and left there to die.  It appears to be the subject of legend and doesn’t seem ever to have been a common custom.]

Out of respect for the ancient art, Shuko Nakamura refers to her creations as “creative masks” rather than Noh masks, but the tribute is clear. And even a traditional mask maker like Mitsue Nakamura sees the place for works that expand the boundaries of Noh’s conservative culture. “Of course, the best masks are those used onstage,” she says, “but I think we should also make Noh masks that can stand on their own.”

[A little more than a dozen years ago, I published a post on Rick On Theater on “The Magic of Masks” (17 September 2011; Rick On Theater: The Magic of Masks).  I looked at masking in a number of different circumstances, including various performance forms—Noh theater among them—and from several different perspectives.

[The interested ROTter might want to have a look at this post (which also touches on puppetry, an allied art form, in passing).  If anyone wants further information on masks and masking, the afterword of “The Magic of Masks” is a list of the people whom I referenced in the post and some of the sources I consulted. 

[(A few words of caution: the mask post, and therefore the list, is 12 years old.  Some of the life-dates included in the list of names are out of date and the person named has since died.  Some of the sources, too, are old and may no longer be readily available.)

[Hannah Kirshner is a writer, artist, and food stylist.  Her reporting has appeared in publications including the New York Times and Food & Wine, among others, and on the Proof podcast from America’s Test Kitchen.  She’s the author and illustrator of Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town (Viking, 2021).  

[Kirshner’s the winner of an International Gourmand “Best In The World” award for writing on Japan.  She grew up on a small farm outside Seattle, studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, and now divides her time between Brooklyn and rural Ishikawa, Japan.]

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.]