The great playwright Tom Stoppard and his simpatico director Patrick Marber make a lasting gift of remembrance in the brilliant, gorgeous and devastating new play Leopoldstadt, opening tonight at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre.
But it’s a gift that comes with strings, ropes even, the author seems to be warning us: There’s burden attached to memory, and pain, and, above all, responsibility – duty, even – that accompanies every yellowed snapshot in an old family album and every fading face that once seemed fixed with such clarity.
Most of us, thankfully, won’t have the unbearably catastrophic history to carry through life that the youngest of Leopoldstadt‘s characters are ultimately left with.
When we reunite with them at the end of the play, in 1955, their numbers dwindled to three, the survivors of Hitler’s campaign to eradicate Europe’s Jews are all that’s left of the once expansive family we’ve come to know in the previous hours.
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