Growing up in Washington, D.C., Carey Perloff loved visiting the Smithsonian museums with her father. As a child her what-I-want-to-be-as-a-grown-up job was archeologist.
Today, she’s an acclaimed theater director, playwright, author, and educator, who led the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco for more than 25 years. Yet, the idea of digging up artifacts, which an archaeologist does, is akin to digging into relationships and personalities, which a director does, she said. Presently, she works on various directing, curating and other theatrical projects. And she’s come home to Washington for a brief spell to direct the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Leopoldstadt, a play that digs into family history.
“My family was very proudly Jewish,” Perloff said about her childhood. “We went to Washington Hebrew [Congregation], but I can’t say we were raised religiously. I was not [a] bat mitzvah, but we were raised with an incredible Jewish consciousness.”
While many Jewish families of the 1960s and ’70s era didn’t discuss the Holocaust with their children, Perloff said, “I feel I had deep knowledge of the Holocaust. I knew my grandparents, my great-grandparents and even my great-great-grandmother very well. … My mother always said to me, ‘No matter what you think, when the knock on the door comes, it’s coming for us.’”
It was no surprise, then, that as a young director, Perloff caught renowned British playwright Tom Stoppard’s attention. Although during their earliest encounters, he wasn’t aware of his deep Jewish background, Perloff said they just seemed to click.
Recently, Perloff was back in Washington, D.C., directing the regional premiere of prolific Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt. The four-time 2023 Tony Award-winning play draws on Stoppard’s once-hidden Jewish family history, which in ways parallels Perloff’s. He knew little about his deep Jewish roots, though, until he was well into adulthood.
British Upbringing, Hidden Jewish History
Born in Czechoslovakia to a Jewish family, who fled east during the Nazi takeover, Stoppard’s parents settled in Singapore. His father was killed in a ship bombing on the way to reunite with his young family, who had then fled to India. His mother remarried to a British major and they settled in India before returning to England, where young Tom had a very English upbringing in British boarding schools.
As he was so young during his family’s refugee period and his mother never spoke about their former life in Czechoslovakia, though she cooked Czech food, Perloff said, Stoppard, now 87, had no idea he was Jewish. He only discovered he had four Jewish grandparents who perished in the Holocaust when he met a Czech cousin in 1993, after the fall of communism. His cousin revealed his Jewish background and that the majority of his extended family perished in the Holocaust.
Whether the erudite and prolific playwright, known for his deep research in works like Arcadia and the Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love, ignored or chose not to reflect on his and his mother’s Czech roots, is a question for another day. In 2020, Stoppard, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1997, unveiled, perhaps, his most autobiographical work to date and it’s a Jewish story with universal resonances.
Leopoldstadt, a memory play, follows four generations of the fictional Merz-Jacobowitz families from 1899 to 1955. This complex history of grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, in-laws, and great-grandchildren tracks their lives as cultured and assimilated Viennese Jews across the 20th century.
It’s a story of familial bonds and fractures, of love and survival, of determination to belong and blindness to threats. In a sense, the play dissects life-and-death choices compelled by 20th-century nationalistic and
antisemitic forces.
Family Photos Capture a Complicated History
While not an easy work to follow — even Perloff admits having trouble keeping track of the 38 actors playing more than 40 characters from different generations — Leopoldstadt tells a current and prescient tale. “I had read it twice, saw it in London before, saw it at the opening on Broadway, and I still couldn’t keep the characters all straight,” Perloff said. “We had to find another way in; there was no way an American theater could afford so many actors, plus child actors. My production is 15 actors, plus children. That means that, for example, the wonderful Rebecca Gibel, who plays Rosa at age 32 in 1924, is the same actress who plays her in 1955. I tried to keep the character through lines as consistent as I could.”
Returning to a Stoppard work now, particularly one that for Perloff resonates closely with her own family history and background, has become a personal tribute to her mother, Marjorie, poet and former professor at Catholic University, who died this past March at age 92. “This play is a way of honoring and mourning my mother. The photographs in the album [on the backdrop] are all my family photographs from the turn of the century. … When they open the album, that’s the ghosts of my grandmother and great-grandmother as a child in Vienna and in Bratislava.”
Perloff added, because her mother’s entire family chose to flee during the Anschluss, her Jewish story differs dramatically from Stoppard’s. “I will never really understand how they knew that they had to go then. [It’s] the opposite story to the family in Stoppard’s play — a tragic story of a family who didn’t get out.”
And it remains a story that Perloff said should never be forgotten.
“I feel this is the moment these stories have to be told,” she said. “To witness the first act of Leopoldstadt, in which the question ‘Is assimilation ever ultimately possible or is Zionism the only answer?’ is one we as Jews will debate forever. [Leopoldstadt] has such resonance and salience right now in a way that I don’t think Stoppard ever anticipated when he wrote the play.”
Leopoldstadt, by Tom Stoppard, directed by Carey Perloff, run to Dec. 29 at Harman Hall of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, 601 F St., NW, Washington, D.C. Tickets are $72 to $215. Visit shakespearetheatre.org/events/leopoldstadt-24-25/#tickets or call 202-547-1122.
Lisa Traiger is Washington Jewish Week’s arts correspondent.
