You’ve heard “Tom Stoppard” and “Shakespeare” in the same breath before; he won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, and his arguably most celebrated play is his Hamlet detour Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. But this staged reading by Austin Shakespeare tackles a weightier work: Stoppard’s Tony Award winning Leopoldstadt, a five-act play tracking an Austrian Jewish family from 1899 to 1955. While not explicitly autobiographical – Stoppard, for one, was born in Czechoslovakia before emigrating to the UK – his family’s history with the Holocaust informed Leopoldstadt, and he’s called it a “very personal” work, up to including his own stand-in in the last act. – Kimberley Jones
March 22-23