The New Yorker Radio Hour - Tom Stoppard on “Leopoldstadt,” and Geena Davis talks with Michael Schulman

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

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. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Tom Stoppard, one of the great playwrights of his generation, is somehow reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov, a writer who was not born to the English language, but who relishes above all the words that are his instrument and his material. Since the success of his early play, Rosencranton-Gildenstern are dead. Stoppert has been celebrated both for his comic genius and the way he plays with ideas in his work. He's 85 years old and until now he's largely resisted the autobiographical element in his plays, but now in Leopoldstadt, he's made that shift.

Leopoldstadt deals with a piece of family history that seems like something from fiction. Much of Stoppard's family had been killed in the Holocaust. His mother escaped from Czechoslovakia with him and his brother and she eventually married a British officer who brought the family to England. Stappert is mining that history in Leopoldstadt in a way that's both personal and very large in scale,

spanning 50 years and featuring a cast of 38 actors, some who play more than one role. I'm lucky to be a writer. I don't want to stop being a writer. And when I finished Leopoldstadt, I was really glad that there was a possibility if I did not write another play, I was really glad about the fact that I'd finished on a big thing.

Tom Stoppard spoke with our contributor, Andrew Dixon, just before the play opened on Broadway. Do you still get those butterflies when you're waiting for an audience to come in? Do you still think about what they're going to think, how they're going to respond? The answer is that I stopped being nervous a few plays ago.

But with this one, I feel, yes, a few butterflies about opening Leopoldstadt here, yeah. When we finish talking, I'm going back to the Longacre Theatre

to sit in the auditorium, which is now absolutely packed with digital boxes of gadgetary and people, which makes, you understand

that, putting on a play on Broadway now, it's a heavy-duty thing. It used to be so simple, comparatively simple. In my youth, we could do an act a day when we were at this stage of the process in technical rehearsal. I'm more nervous than I used to be because just by breathing that atmosphere,

you get a sense of how high the stakes must be. The play itself is all about time. It's this journey through nearly 60 years of history from 1890 to 1955, the story of one Jewish family over several generations, as they're slowly sucked into the horrors of the Holocaust. What made you want to write on that kind of scale? It's such an enormous canvas of time. Well, the way you put it is as though I'd kind of made a decision to write on a particular scale,

but it was more a case that I was writing without the usual constraints because I was given the kind of carte blanche by Sonia Friedman to write anything I like and she'd do everything she could possibly do to get it on. And she's the producer, we should say. She's the producer of Leopoldstead. And I knew I wanted to write kind of a bleak version of my family background. And more particularly, I wanted to write about coming to England at the age of eight. And I thought when I set off with the play that the second half would be set in England

and would take me through the first 20 years of my life. It didn't work out like that. Plays never do. They find their own architecture and their own story, even. So I just went along with what I had and tried to be inventive, and I ended up writing about myself in 1955. So I do get into my own play for the last 20 minutes or so. But that young man's family history is only in the broadest sense like mine. There's enough shared experience, as I found as soon as the play was out there,

there's enough shared experience to go around tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of families who all can say, you're writing about my family. Of course, they know I'm not and I know that I'm not, but it's also true that, yes, I'm writing about their families too. Because it's, as you say, it has these fascinating autobiographical hints, I guess, if anyone knows anything about your backstory that, you know, you were evacuated as it were to England or travelled to England when you were, when you were eight, you had this very, very English upbringing. And this hidden history, which you only discovered in your 50s, when I think a relative, a cousin of yours, got in touch and said, do you know what happened to your family? And she said,

well, well, you're Jewish. You know, four of your grandparents died in the Holocaust, several of your aunts, there was this whole other history and this side to your family history and to yourself that you hadn't really known about. Is that true? You had just not known it? Yes, I mean, it does sound pretty awful and weird as well, but I did not know it. I didn't know that my mother's sisters existed. I didn't know what happened to my four grandparents, But at the same time, I could have found out if I'd persisted, and I wasn't a complete idiot. I knew we left Czech Slovakia because of the Jewish problem or the Nazi problem, depending on where you are. And I'd talk to my mother about that very occasionally.

But like my mother, I was just facing forward and getting on with life. when you're eight, nine, ten years old, whatever, you take what comes. I was at a boarding school in an Indian hill station when I was five. My father unknowingly, unknowing to me, meanwhile being killed by the Japanese. Was it also that your mother didn't really want her? No, she really did not. She married Major Stoppard, bless her. He brought us to England.

She didn't want to look back, and she didn't. She never really talked much about the past. I didn't ask many questions, but actually come to think of it much later on. I asked her to write down everything she could remember pretty much. I gave her a very beautiful leather-bound notebook to do it in which she ignored. But it's misleading to see me as somebody who blithely in. innocently at the age of 40-something,

thought, oh my goodness, I had no idea I was a member of a Jewish family. It's a complete nonsense. Of course I knew, but I didn't know who they were. And I didn't feel I had to find out in order to live my own life. But that wasn't really true. When you were writing Leopoldstadt, are there things that you wish you could have asked her about it, Like revisiting that history, are there questions that have come up?

No, she wouldn't have much liked me writing the play at all, I don't think. Or perhaps by that time it wouldn't matter. I mean, she died in the 90s. Up to that time, especially earlier, she really wouldn't have liked me to write about myself as somebody who's actually Czech and had relatives living in communist Czechoslovakia. She just didn't want to... She was scared of communists.

She'd been scooped out of the way of Hitler and then out of the way of the Japanese. And I guess when my father was dead and we were still in India, I guess if she hadn't married a British army officer, we might have gone back home, which wouldn't have been so great. We're talking about these autobiographical resonances

in Leopoldstadt, the play. You've said in an early version of it, or your original intention was actually to write yourself into the play. And it sounds a little bit like you then kind of wrote yourself out of the play because what we have right at the end, I think pretty much in the final scene, there is a character who you call Leo. He's an English writer. He writes these funny books.

He itself, it turns out, is a refugee. He doesn't know anything about his history. And his Jewish relatives explain it. No, it's a brazen self-pillage. I mean, it is. There's an element of confessional about it, of course. He speaks for me, and he ends up in tears with good reason to be in tears. And I don't want to be mockish on a radio, but I think I can say that they're my tears.

You made the very unwise statement when someone was interviewing about Leopoldstadt, and you said it could be your last play. It made a lot of headlines. Then you said, actually, well, maybe it isn't my last play. That's just how I was feeling at the time. I'm not sure. I guess the question is, you know, how are you feeling now? Are you trying to write another play?

I am. And I really, really very much would like to be working on another play because, well, it comes down to it. You know, I have family to love and be loved by, so it seems not the most tactful thing to say about one's work, but in a way it is one's work which makes one's life purposive. I don't get enough energy out of being a father and a grandfather. I am a writer. I'm lucky to be a writer. I don't want to stop being a writer.

And when I finished Leopoistadt, I was really glad that there was a possibility that if I I did not write another play. I was really glad about the fact that I'd finished on a big thing. So it struck me as a good idea to retire at that point. So I would not end up in my twilight years writing miniatures. And I might not yet have escaped that fate because I'd rather write a miniature than nothing. And it turns out that my last direct and personal experience of writing plays

would turn out to be sitting in the Wyndham's Theatre in London and then the Longacre Theatre in New York City, sitting in those houses that had been there a long time with all kinds of work on their boards. If it turns out my last direct experience was sitting in an audience, watching and listening to Leopoldstadt, that will be a fortunate destiny. I'd consider myself blessed. I wonder if I could just ask you about one other thing, which is that we're talking fairly

soon after the death of the Queen. It's also a huge story in all sorts of ways. You met her a number of times, I think. Did you get a sense of her? Yes, I have met her a number of times, but the person, one is lost. The loss one feels is not the loss of the person one met, but the loss of the office itself, the loss of that person who represented the constitutional monarchy

for the whole of my life. I mean, as we keep saying, I was eight when I got to England. I was a subject of one woman, this one monarch. You know, the loss is real because, well, maybe, who knows? I mean, there's all kinds of people out there, and I imagine lots of them hate the very idea of a monarchy. I've always loved the monarchy as an abstract idea, and I've also loved the way that this queen, Queen Elizabeth II, comported herself, and the way she took the way she took.

the role seriously. I mean, we say this about actors, don't we? But the Queen really did inhabit that role. Yes. I mean, the whole point and purpose of a mask is that it doesn't slip, that's what it's for. She's quite aware, or was quite aware of the effect she had on people

who were meeting her for the first time. And, you know, the commonest story there is about people who meet the Queen for the first time is how friendly and informal the experience turned out to be. And that was your experience as well? Yeah. Yeah.

It's been a delight to speak, Tom. Thank you so much for the time. I've enjoyed myself with you, Andy. Thank you very much. Tom Stoppard's play, Leopoldstadt, is playing on Broadway. You can read more from Andrew Dixon's interview with Stoppard at New Yorker.com. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Gina Davis was in some of the quirkiest and most interesting films of the 80s, The Fly and Tutsi, and she's certainly best remembered now for Thelma and Louise, which was groundbreaking in its moment, a saga or a buddy movie about the consequences of women striking back against male violence.

Gina Davis has now written a memoir about her life on and off the camera, and she spoke with staff writer Michael Schulman, who covers entertainment. You may not have seen Gina Davis in a movie lately, but you might have caught her at the Emmy Awards last month, where she was honored for her work with the Gina Davis Institute on Gender in Media. 20 years ago, she was watching TV with her two-year-old daughter and was shocked to see how few female characters were on screen.

She wanted to know how big of a problem this was. So she spearheaded a major research project to gather data on gender representation in children's entertainment. And that's how an Oscar-winning movie star began her new life as what she calls a middle-aged data geek. She would walk into executive's offices armed with numbers, but she wasn't confrontational. It was polite. It was very polite. My approach was very polite because I said, I know you don't know this, you know, take it, whatever, do whatever you want with it. I just thought, you know, you might like to hear this.

And I'm never going to bust you publicly. I'm never going to name a movie or a studio or anything. This is just private between us. It turns out the politeness is something that Gina Davis has been wrestling with her whole life. And it's one of the subjects of her new memoir, Dying of Politeness. How did you learn politeness and why is it so deadly? Well, I learned politeness from minute one, I'm sure. I mean, that was my family, you know, very,

old-fashioned New Englanders, both from Vermont. Well, it wasn't so much being kind. It was not making anyone go out of their way for you, for anything. Never ask for anything, never need anything. But on the other side, offer everything. Like, my dad fixed everybody on the street. He fixed their plumbing or their furnace or their car or whatever, you know. It was just in my family.

Right. And when did you realize? that there was a kind of downside to politeness? Well, I mean, it was painful sometimes to say no. You know, if we went to visit friends' houses and they offered me candy, I had to say no. And my best friend's mom was an incredible cook. Oh, she made this chicken with garlic. It was incredible.

Anyway, and I'd be smelling that. And like, oh, it's time for me to go home for dinner. And she'd say, Gina, do you want to stay? No, no, thank you. And she'd call my mom and just say, Lucille. Gina's staying for dinner. All right, talk to you later. So she would rescue me from my own politeness. I want to talk a little bit about your earlier career. You moved to New York in 1978. What was the plan? Oh, I knew I wanted to be in movies rather than plays. Nobody told me that if you want to be in movies, you should probably go to L.A.

So my plan was I would become a model and then people would just offer me movies because at that time, Christy Brinkley was showing up in a couple of movies and Lauren Hutton. And I thought, okay, it's so much easier to become a supermodel than an actor. I mean, I must have assumed that, which was crazy. I have to ask you about this. when you were pursuing your modeling career, you were working on Ann Taylor on Fifth Avenue. And, you know, this is not something that an extremely shy, self-effacing person would necessarily do. But you kind of put on your own version of street theater. Can you just explain what happened?

So I tried to look very nice every day, you know, fully made up and hair done and maybe Anne Taylor clothes even. And one weekend, the window display in the front on the street, was a couple of mannequins sitting, but there was one empty chair in between them. And I said to one of my friends, dare me to go in the window and pretend to be a mannequin. And I just sneaked in the window. I sat down. A couple of people had been looking in the window and saw me do this. And then they're like, what's you going to do? And then more people are coming up.

What are you guys looking at? Just wait, just wait. And then I finally moved. And they were like, ah! clap. I mean, what was motivating you? Just for kicks, see if I could do it. I mean, I didn't intend to make a thing out of it. I was just going to do it that once, but they started hiring me to do that on Saturdays, you know, like five hours in the window. Ultimately, the model to actor plan kind of worked. I mean, you got your first role in Tootsie through modeling, didn't you?

It completely worked. When they were casting Tootsie, the role that I ended up playing needed to be in her underwear in a couple of scenes. And they thought, well, let's just check if there's any models who can act. So they called all the modeling agencies to see, and my agents said, yes, we have one. And so I got to audition. And they said, wear a bathing suit under your clothes. And so I read, it was just with like an assistant casting director on a video camera. I read and she said, okay, thank you.

And I left. And I was like, well, that's fine. I didn't do well enough. And plus, on my first audition ever, you know, what are the odds I'm going to get in a movie with Dustin Hoffman. And so then I went to Paris to do the collections. And Cindy Pollock saw my audition tape and said, hey, wait a minute, I like this girl. Where's her bathing suit stuff? They said, oh, we forgot.

Get her back. We can't. She's in Paris. And to my great happiness, I had been in a Victoria's. secret catalog. And so they sent the photos from that over there. So as opposed to being, you know, in Midtown Manhattan and some dingy office building, I had perfectly lit airbrushed fan-blowing photos of me in underwear already. And I guess that clinched it. So much of the arc of the book is about how you learned sort of boldness.

and bravery and assertiveness from your characters. What was an early example of that? Well, yeah, yeah. I had to play someone who was so much bolder than myself. Accidental tourist was one where she was very confrontational in a way and said what she thought at the moment she thought it and was not going to give up on things very tenacious and wasn't going to take no for an answer.

And so that was really the first time that I had to really step outside myself. Muriel Pritchett. Let me give you my card. Oh, well, I'll bear that in mind. Thank you very much. Or just call for no reason. Call and talk. Talk?

Sure. Talk about Edward. His problems. Talk about anything. Pick up the phone and just talk. Don't you ever get the urge to do that? Not really. This is your Oscar-winning role as Muriel Pritchett, the dog trainer, opposite William Hurt,

and you write about reading the book and immediately wanting to option it yourself. Right. I mean, what was it about that character? Was it that sense of wanting to be like her in some way? Oh, yeah, definitely. You know, she's so colorful. And I thought, wow, how fun would it be to play this character? Optioning a book, I mean, that wasn't something that was going to happen.

But Dustin Hoffman had given me that advice when I was on Tutsi. He said, read a lot of books. And if you see something you like, try to get the rights. Dustin Hoffman seems to have a lot of advice for you, didn't he? Yeah, all day long he was giving me advice, yeah. Because he also told you, don't sleep with your co-stars, and if they want to say, what was the line? You want me to tell that story? Please.

So after Tutsi, my model agent took me and a couple of other actors slash models to Hollywood. to meet casting directors, and he happened to know Jack Nicholson. And every single night, Jack Nicholson had dinner with us. And then one day I came back, and there was a note under the door that said, please call Jack Nicholson and this number. And I was like, I can't believe it. Jack Nicholson called me? Oh, my God.

But anyway, I said, hello, Mr. Nicholson. This is Gina, the model. You called me. I said, yeah, hey, Gina, when is it going to happen? I was like, oh, no. But it immediately came into my head what to say because I'd been holding out of this advice. So I said, oh, Jack, I would love to. You're very attractive.

But I have a feeling we're going to work together at some point in the future. And I would hate to have ruined the sexual tension between us. He was like, oh, man, where'd you get that? So it worked. So getting back to accidental tourists, how did that character kind of rub off on you? I became much more able to be assertive, more than I was, which was profoundly unassertive. In a way that seems like a bit of what happened in Thelman-Louise, which is that the off-screen dynamic between you and Susan Sarand, kind of mirrored how Louise emboldens Delma.

Absolutely, yeah. I was so in awe and admired Susan Saranad so much and to witness that nobody gave a shit if she said what she thought. You know, like she never used qualifiers. Like, I don't know what people would think or I don't know. This is probably a stupid idea. And that was my life was a string of qualifiers before I was saying. anything. So the whole, whole, whole, whole shoot was an education for me and how to very calmly

and capably say what you want. I don't know. I don't know, Louise. I mean, I don't know what you're asking. Now, don't you, don't you start flaking out? I mean, God damn it, Thelman. Every time we get in trouble, you just get blank or pleading sanity or some such shit. Not this time. I mean, this time, Things have changed. Everything's changed. Now, you, of course, were in these two iconic feminist movies right back to back, Thelma and Louise, and League of Their Own. I mean, they were so impactful. Oh, yeah. So Thumb and Louise exploded onto the scene.

Like Susan and I were on the cover of Time magazine a week later or something. So in the headline was why Thelma and Louise strikes a nerve. not why is someone who is so great? And then what kind of response you remember for a league of their own? What I noticed was before it came out, a lot of people came to the set to interview me or us. And during these interviews, it was fascinated because almost every single person, male or female, said, so would you say this is a feminist movie, kind of in this wink, wink tone, you know, like. And I'd say, yeah, yeah, it is.

And they'd be like, it is? What? It is? Are you saying you're a feminist? And I'd say, yeah, sure. They couldn't believe I would say that out loud, which is so crazy. But that's how strong the backlash was at that time. I want to talk about a period in your career that doesn't get as much attention, which is right after that.

You know, we always hear about women in Hollywood turning 40 and suddenly just not getting roles. But I'd sort of like to hear it about how that, what exactly happened from your perspective? It was just absolutely heartbreaking because this is my thing. It felt like forced retirement or something. The work just literally dried up. It was incredibly painful. But it also seems to me like that period where you were not working as much was fruitful in other ways because you took up other interests. I mean, one of them was archery.

Can you describe how you took up an interest in archery? So I had to learn how to play baseball for League of Their Own. And I was really worried about it because I'd never been athletic. So trained with the coaches that they had, and they very soon said, you have some real untapped athletic ability. And I was like, wow, I do. So then I was determined, I want to take up a sport in the real way and not, you know, a movie version of it. And so I picked archery because I saw it on TV during the Olympics in Atlanta. and then total immersion.

And yeah, I was a semi-finalist for the Olympic trials two years later. It was incredible. I really changed my body image and the idea of how much space I could take up in the world, you know, to become athletic and realize that I don't have to be ashamed of how tall I am. I don't ashamed of my body because I can do cool things. So it really, it was very transformative. Gina Davis, talking with Michael Shulman, her new memoir is called Dying of Politeness. Gina, this has been so much fun. Thank you. Thank you again. It's great to talk to you.

You too, Michael. I'm sorry I wasn't sometimes very articulate. That's still dying of politeness. Oh, my God. You see? I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Breda Green, Calliola, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gophane and Gophon.

Along with Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, Jenny Lawton, and Michael May. And we had assistance from Harrison Keithline and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.