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Robert Sean Leonard to Star in The Invention of Love
Broadway.com
November 3, 2000
Robert Sean Leonard to Star in The Invention of Love Broadway.com, Nov 3, 2000 Robert Sean Leonard will star in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love. The New York Times reported today that the popular actor will be in the Lincoln Center production scheduled to open on March 29 at the Lyceum.
Leonard's Broadway credits include The Speed of Darkness, Candida, The Iceman Cometh and the Lincoln Center production of Stoppard's Arcadia. In this show, Leonard will play a young A.E. Housman.
The Invention of Love centers on the life of Housman, the famous poet and scholar. In the play, an old Housman dreams that he is dead. As Charon, the mythical boatman, ferries him across the River Styx, Housman returns to the Oxford of his youth where he fell in love with scholarship and with his fellow student, Moses Jackson. Stoppard's dream world includes Victorian London, where Parliament made homosexuality a crime, and the French seashore, where Oscar Wilde--convicted of that very crime--is living out his final days. Richard Easton will play Housman in his later years.
Three of Stoppard's plays (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties and The Real Thing) have won Tony Awards. He also won a 1999 Academy Award for co-writing Shakespeare in Love.
The Invention of Love had pre-Broadway presentations at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, Philadelphia's Wilma Theatre and Chicago's Court Theatre.
