![]() Antisemitic slights and violence are frequent enough that even the Merzes take notice. ![]() One of the always ambient children is confused enough about the distinctions between Jew, gentile and Austrian to top the family’s Christmas tree with a Star of David.Īustrian gentiles are not confused, though. Hermann Merz (David Krumholtz), the wealthy businessman in whose apartment near the fashionable Ringstrasse the story unfolds, has even converted to Catholicism as a kind of insurance. In the play’s first three acts - it has five, each set in a different year and performed without intermission over the course of 2 hours and 10 minutes - Stoppard posits the Merzes, and their relatives-by-marriage, the Jakoboviczes, as golden examples of assimilation. Whether complacency is a moral failing, as “Leopoldstadt” seems to argue, is a vexing question. The cosmopolitan, intermarried and profoundly cultured clan, given less than a day to pack for a future most will not survive, finally understands that, for Jews, history has no hinge the abyss is always open. What had been until then a loving portrait of Austrian Jewish bourgeois society in the years before the Anschluss - the play begins in 1899 and will follow the family through 1955 - becomes, as the Nazis enter not just the Merzes’ homeland but their home, a portrait of that society’s self-delusion. It is also the word that turns “ Leopoldstadt,” the harrowing new Tom Stoppard play that opened on Sunday at the Longacre Theater, from a domestic comedy into a Greek drama. With that one word, the hinge of history swings open upon the abyss. The pianist, Hanna (Colleen Litchfield), goes to answer it and hastily returns. In November 1938, in Vienna, life chez Merz - the reciting of books, the games of cat’s cradle, the polished renditions of Haydn at the piano - proceeds with only brief interruptions despite the nearby sounds of broken glass.
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