A Stoppard whisperer is directing ‘Leopoldstadt' at Writers Theatre
What qualifies a director to take on “Leopoldstadt,” the deeply personal final masterpiece of the late British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard? It’s a work not only suffused with survivor’s guilt, but dedicated to the question of whether the erasure of Stoppard’s Jewish identity by his own well-meaning mother, Martha Becková, was an immoral act that led to Stoppard being haunted throughout his life by Austrian ghosts.
Having had a mother who was born into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna and escaped the Anschluss in Austria in 1938 and became an erudite literary critic Stateside would seem a promising claim.
Such is the family tree of Carey Perloff, the daughter of the academic critic Marjorie Perloff, and a 67-year-old theater director who has cut a broad and brash swath through nonprofit American theater - but somehow never before through Chicago, a city where she has never directed.
Until this summer, when the longtime family friend of Stoppard takes on a play at Writers Theatre that most every theater and director in the city wanted, or at least should have wanted.
“‘Leopoldstadt,'” Perloff says, by way of an understatement from her temporary housing near Writers in Glencoe, “is such a gorgeous and heartbreaking play.”
It’s also a massive undertaking for Writers Theatre. In its original London production in 2020, Sonya Friedman Productions hired 42 actors, both children and adults, for director Patrick Marber’s production, one of whom was Stoppard’s own son, Ed Stoppard.
That size of cast, some of which later moved to Broadway, where I first saw “Leopoldstadt” in 2022, was needed to tell the story of four generations of two extended Viennese Jewish families, covering a chronological period from the cultural nirvana that was Austria in 1899 to a 1955 coda filled with Jewish grief and regret - even as former Nazi collaborators covered their tracks and quietly reassumed their conductor’s podiums at the city’s orchestras.
Stoppard, who previously had written such spectacular plays as “The Real Thing,” “Arcadia," "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," "The Coast of Utopia," “Indian Ink,” "Travesties," “The Hard Problem,” "Night and Day," all of which have been seen in Chicago, made clear from the start that “Leopoldstadt” was to be his last major play, a consequence, he said, of both his advanced age and the time it now took him to write.
In theatrical circles on both sides of the Atlantic, people were expecting a Stoppardian version of William Shakespeare’s valedictory “The Tempest.” In the end, Stoppard conjured up no Prospero, but rather a stunner of a play that asked what we all owe those lives that make up our imperfect memories and who made us what we become.
In the end, even after his shimmering wit and formidable smarts led him to a career of delightful diversions into everything from aesthetics to neurophysics to Pink Floyd, Stoppard went back to his own beginnings. As so many of us do.
Thus, “Leopoldstadt” (the title is taken from the Jewish quarter in Vienna) became an exploration of Stoppard’s own identity. In simple terms, his mother and her second husband had raised him an an upper-class Brit, hence his easy entree into London’s theater scene and his ability to cut a dashing path. His mother made little or no reference to the Austrian relatives who had been snatched from Vienna’s glamorous cultural swirl and sent off to perish in the Nazi camps. Stoppard lived a quintessentially English life, albeit encrusted with celebrity, set apart from them by maternal design.
In his last play, he not only acknowledged that he stood on their collective shoulders, but he set about attacking Austrian complacency and making their case for immortality.
And this being the theater, it has to be made night after night after night.
“Austria never went through any of the deep self-analysis and self-laceration Germany went though,” Perloff says. “That’s the big argument that the character Nathan makes in the last scene of the play, and I think it explains why so few Jews have gone back. Herman, another character, says that without Jews, Austria would have been the Mongolia of Europe: “We were 10% of the population and 70% of the composers and journalists.”
Until they were gone.
Stoppard, of course, was famously allergic to preachy or dialectical plays - setting himself apart from many of his politically committed peers in the British theater of the late 20th century.
“He would invariably give the best arguments in his plays to the characters with whom he disagreed the most,” Perloff says. “He had a very deep moral center and he didn’t think that plays should exist to make a point.” So while the characters in “Leopoldstadt” discuss hot-button issues like, say, Zionism or a nation’s complacency, they are not necessarily speaking with the authorial voice.
That said, anyone who has seen the entire Stoppard oeuvre likely would conclude that he suspended that rule more overtly in this play than in any other work. One knows here what he believes and feels.
“The Viennese Jewish community in Vienna in 1899 had an unbelievable level of aesthetic refinement, and appetite for aesthetic exploration” Perloff says, noting that it would beget “Freud, Marx, Mahler (and) Schnitzler,” as well as a rising antisemitic tide that was ignored for too long by many of Vienna’s cultured Jews, the director said, who were unwilling to believe “that it could ever turn on them.” But turn it did.
While Stoppard was still alive, Perloff’s personal connections to the writer helped her collaborate with him on a version of “Leopoldstadt” that redid the original doubling of actors, removed a handful of very minor characters and made it possible to produce the play with 15 adult actors and eight children. She’d made it clear to Stoppard that the play’s future life depended on it, being as “no nonprofit American theater could afford to do a play with 42 actors.” That version, as directed by Perloff, was first seen in 2024 at the Huntington Theatre in Boston, technically becoming the first American production since the Broadway staging was a London import. The same cast then moved to the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. Small additional changes to the text were made by Stoppard and Perloff after the Washington production and will be seen for the first time at Writers. The playwright died late last year.
The cast will be familiar and impressive to any longtime fan of Chicago theater: Kate Fry, Sean Fortunato, Andrew Mueller, Ian Barford, Jessie Fisher, Erik Hellman, Joey Slotnick and many others. Perloff says the theater cast the show several months ago and she was worried that, as is typical in the theater, some actors would drop out in favor of more desirable or lucrative employment. That did not prove to be the case.
“Writers told me that this was the play these Chicago actors wanted to do the most,” Perloff says. “The theater were right. They all stuck with it. They are absolutely fierce and they all love to work together.”
Unlike the prosceniums of Broadway and the West End, Writers Theatre operates in an intimate thrust space. “It’s not like watching these characters in a theater where you feel safe,” Perloff says. ” When you are in the room with these characters, it is a completely different experience. And it is not happening anywhere else.”
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
If you go
“Leopoldstadt” runs through July 19 at Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe; www.writerstheatre.org
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This story was originally published June 8, 2026 at 5:32 AM.