Who: Tom Stoppard, Daniel Kehlmann
What: Conversations & Performances discussion
Where: Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd St. Y, Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92Y online
When: Sunday, September 18, in person $15-$31, online $20, 4:30
Why: “Anti-Semitism is a political fact. It’s a bit soon for it to be a party platform, but when it is there will be Austrians to vote for it,” a character states in Tom Stoppard’s new Olivier Award–winning play, Leopoldstadt, which opens October 2 at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway. On September 18, Stoppard will be at the 92nd St. Y to inaugurate the eighty-fourth anniversary of the Unterberg Poetry Center — a year younger than he is — to discuss the play, which was partly inspired by his family history. The British playwright and screenwriter will be joined by German and Austrian author and translator Daniel Kehlmann, who has written such novels as You Should Have Left, Tyll, and Fame and translated Leopoldstadt into German.
Stoppard, born Tomáš Sträussler in 1937 in what is now the Czech Republic, is arguably the greatest living playwright of the last sixty years; his works include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, The Real Thing, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, and The Coast of Utopia, earning four Tonys and two Oliviers for Best Play. Sir Thomas has also won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. His latest play, his most personal, begins in Vienna in 1899, in the Jewish quarter known as Leopoldstadt, and features more than three dozen characters; directed by Tony and Oscar nominee Patrick Marber (Closer, Notes on a Scandal), it is currently scheduled to run through January 29, 2023.