Tom Stoppard on “Leopoldstadt,” and Geena Davis talks with Michael Schulman

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2022

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

Tom Stoppard has been a fixture on Broadway since his famous early play, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” travelled there in 1967. Stoppard is eighty-five years old, and has largely resisted the autobiographical element in his work. But now, in “Leopoldstadt,” a play that has just opened on Broadway, he draws on his family’s tragic losses in the Second World War. Stoppard talks with the contributor Andrew Dickson about his latest work.

And the Oscar- and Emmy Award-winning actor Geena Davis, best known for her role in “Thelma and Louise,” talks with the staff writer Michael Schulman about her life and career. Davis ascribes much of her early experience on- and offscreen to a certain level of politeness, a character trait ingrained in her from childhood. “I learned politeness from minute one, I’m sure,” she tells Schulman. “That was my family: very old-fashioned New Englanders.” She reflects on her childhood, her iconic roles in the eighties and nineties, and her “journey to badassery” in her new memoir, “Dying of Politeness,” out this month.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNWC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:16.6	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:20.2	Tom Stoppert, one of the great playwrights of his generation, is somehow reminiscent
0:24.5	of Vladimir Nabokov, a writer who was not born to the English language but who relishes
0:29.7	above all the words that are his instrument and his material.
0:34.8	Since the success of his early play, Rosen Kranson, Gildenstern, are dead, Stoppert has been
0:39.4	celebrated both for his comic genius and the way he plays with ideas in his work.
0:45.0	He's 85 years old and until now he's largely resisted the autobiographical element in
0:49.5	his place, but now, in Leopoldstadt, he's made that shift.
0:55.9	Leopoldstadt deals with a piece of family history that seems like something from fiction.
1:01.7	Much of Stoppert's family had been killed in the Holocaust.
1:04.8	His mother escaped from Czechoslovakia with him and his brother and she eventually married
1:09.1	a British officer who brought the family to England.
1:13.8	Stoppert is mining that history in Leopoldstadt in a way that's both personal and very large
1:19.3	in scale, spanning 50 years and featuring a cast of 38 actors, some who play more than
1:26.3	one role.
1:27.3	I'm lucky to be a writer, I don't want to stop being a writer and when I finished Leopoldstadt,
1:33.2	I was really glad that there was a possibility that if I did not write another play, I was
1:38.9	really glad about the fact that I'd finished on a big thing.
1:43.6	Tom Stoppert spoke with our contributor, Andrew Dixon, just before the play opened
1:47.6	on Broadway.
1:50.2	Do you still get those butterflies when you're waiting for an audience to come in?
	...

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