Stage Door News
Stage Door News
A new play, The Dialogues of Leopold and Loeb, will be presented by Labyrinthus Mundi Productions at the Alumnae Theatre (studio space), April 13-17th, 2016. Written by Brad Walton, directed by Nina Kaye, starring Tom Beattie and Alex Clay.
The author, Brad Walton, was unsatisfied with previous depictions of Leopold and Loeb, whether on stage or screen. There has been a tendency to over-simplify, caricature, or fictionalize them. I wished to do full historic and dramatic justice to their extraordinarily complex characters, and to explore their relationship in all its intricacy and complexity.
Walton stuck closely to the surviving records : the trial transcripts, psychiatric interviews, newspaper reports, surviving letters, Leopold's autobiography (always to be read critically) and the memoirs and reminiscences of those who knew the pair, whether as free men or convicts.
"So far as I know," writes Walton, "this is the first play to focus more or less exclusively on the personalities of, and the intricate dynamics between, Leopold and Loeb, omitting all collateral characters from the dramatic action. The diluted focus of previous non-fictional treatments has tended to place Leopold and Loeb at arm's length, leaving the subtler psychological and relational details to metaphor and allegory, or completely ignored. In The Dialogues of Leopold and Loeb I have tried to place the infamous murderers under a microscope, avoiding fiction, oversimplification and romanticization, and letting history speak directly as drama."
The play focuses on the twelve months preceding Leopold's and Loeb's kidnapping and murder of a random victim, Bobby Franks, on May 21, 1924. It explores the renewal of Leopold's and Loeb's friendship, after a period of relative estrangement, and follows them as they embarked on a trajectory of escalating crime, while a bond of common guilt and mutual need--a bond they tried unsuccessfully to dissolve--tightened between them.
It also explores their intellectual lives--often alluded to in drama, but rarely shown. It shows how they interacted with and used literature to stimulate their criminal brutality.
Essentially, we have attempted to understand them. But when all the evidence has been examined and sifted, there remains something utterly elusive about them, something astounding and impenetrably mysterious.
For more, visit www.dialoguesofleopoldandloeb.ca.
Photo: Alex Clay as Loeb and Tom Beattie as Leopold. ©2016 Amir Gavriely.
2016-03-28
Toronto: Labyrithus Mundi Productions presents "The Dialogues of Leopold and Loeb" April 13-17