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"Rock and Roll" continues until June 7 at Chicago's Goodman Theatre.

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Some notes on Tom Stoppard:

Tom Stoppard has won four Tony Awards for Best Play: "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" (1968), "Travesties" (1976), "The Real Thing" (1984) and "The Coast of Utopia" (2007), in four different decades.

His trilogy, "The Coast of Utopia", won seven Tonys, more than any other dramatic production. "The History Boys" and "Death of a Salesman" had each won six.

His screenwriting career is not as well known, but he has written all or part of seven screenplays. For "Brazil" and "Shakespeare in Love," he received Oscar nominations. He and Marc Norman shared the Academy Award for "Shakespeare in Love."

In polishing the dialogue for "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," he ended up writing most the dialogue.

He has written several plays for British radio and television and adapted earlier plays for modern audiences.

His short play, "The 15-Minute Hamlet" is one of the true masterful satires on stage directing, a job he did only once in his career, a 1973 British production of Garson Kanin's "Born Yesterday."

His 1978 play "Night and Day" is about journalism, a job he did for over five years.
"Stoppardian" is a term used to describe witty statements as a literary device to create comedy while addressing political or philosophical ideas.

In 2008, Stoppard made Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was number 76.

Tom Stoppard's latest examination of politics and people is "Rock and Roll," and here he returns to his home country of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) to view freedom of expression, codes of political idealism and freedom of expression through the metaphor of rock music.

In a play that spans 22 years, three generations and two countries, Stoppard gives us a glimpse of what his life might have been as he weaves us into the lives of others. Charles Newell's current production of "Rock and Roll" at Chicago's Goodman Theatre gives us a vivid picture of an era and a fine snapshot of the excellence of Chicago area stage talent.

Yes, there are many snap shots of Stoppard's own life and politics woven into this interesting story. Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in Zin, Czechoslovakia in 1937, and by the spring of 1939, the family fled the country with other Jewish families to avoid the distinct possibility of being a cancelled Czech. His main character of Jan, played wonderfully by Timothy Edward Kane, is very much an alter-ego of the playwright. Stoppard's mother married a British army major, Kenneth Stoppard, who survived the war, unlike Stoppard's real father who died in a

Japanese prison camp. Moving to England in 1946, Stoppard was raised British and stayed there until the Iron Curtain was down. On stage, in "Rock and Roll", Jan, fatefully returns to Czechosolovakia after the reform efforts of 1968 prompted a Soviet invasion to bring the wayward Czechs and Slovaks back into a stricter communist mold.

As the play progresses, we follow Jan struggling in a tightly controlled Czechoslovakia and his friends in England struggling with their lives against different challenges. Here Stoppard creates a life that might have been had he returned. What makes "Rock and Roll” interesting is the complexities of his characters. One of his main English characters, Max, is an old-line, unapologetic Marxist, who tries to understand the horrors of hard-line Soviet policy. Stephen Yoakam's realization of Max makes this difficult character almost understandable as he balances his idealism with realities. All of this is even more fascinating as you realize Stoppard's personal anti-communism is always in the subtext. In earlier plays like "Professional Foul" and "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour", his anti-communist message is right up front. Here, mixes well with his characters as they struggle through the human side as much as the political side of their lives.

Much of this play is standard Stoppard and that is good news, and some of it is great. Charles Newell, the Artistic Director of the Court Theater, who directed many fine productions of Stoppard's scripts in Chicago, has rightly been recruited by the Goodman to stage this complex work. He is really the star of this production and he makes this ensemble soar. Certain areas are perhaps too much for anyone to overcome and it is never made clear why Jan left Cambridge to return to Soviet clamped-down Czechoslovakia -- that is a the critical turning point of the story. But, giving this masterful playwright a little license, one can enjoy the continuing work of one of the English language's greatest playwrights. He can bring drama and politics vividly to the stage and explain them both very well using the on-going metaphor of rock music as the ultimate symbol of personal freedom.