Leopoldstadt, Shakespeare Theatre Company
Tom Stoppard has had a reputation for many years as a playwright whose work is built on esoteric foundations. Despite the vast scope and variety of the kind of play his earlier career could encompass, it's easy now to point towards his plays with references that sound like the titles of episodes of Friends : The One about Chaos Theory, The One with the Dadaism, The Moral Philosophy/Consciousness/Socialism, Cancer and the Prague Spring. With Leopoldstadt , his most recent work now playing at the Shakespeare Theatre, you could likewise come up with various levels of elevator-pitch-length summations. It's a play about a family. It's a play about the shifting experiences of a Jewish family in Vienna that begins in 1899 and ends in the 1950s. It's a play deeply inspired by the life of Tomáš Sträussler, the young Jewish boy would would become the utterly Anglified Tom Stoppard and only work to rediscover his roots and heritage many years later. The cast of Leopoldstadt . Pho...
