How often do we see a great playwright grapple with a monumental and tragic part of his family history that he didn’t know — or seek to know — until middle age, and with the consequent lacerations of his own conscience?
That’s the offstage drama behind Tom Stoppard’s wrenching-but-flawed “Leopoldstadt,” a mea culpa in theatrical form that’s now at the Huntington under the direction of Carey Perloff.
A Tony Award winner last year for best play, “Leopoldstadt” ran on Broadway from October 2022 to July 2023. It unfolds from 1899 to 1955, with stops in 1924 and 1938, as it tells the multigenerational story of a Jewish family in Vienna decimated by the Holocaust.
There’s a grim timeliness to “Leopoldstadt,” given the resurgence of antisemitism in the United States. With a story too urgent to adorn with filigree, Stoppard relies less in “Leopoldstadt” on the dazzling wordplay that has long been one of his calling cards, going back as far as the mid-1960s, when “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” announced the arrival of a huge talent.
Another one of Stoppard’s trademarks — working on, and populating, a large canvas — is front and center in “Leopoldstadt.” And that’s where the play gets into trouble.
There are nearly three dozen characters in “Leopoldstadt.” Granted, this playwright has always challenged his audiences, asking them to do a lot of work. And far be it from me (or anybody) to tell Tom Stoppard his business.
But showcasing fewer characters would deepen the emotional impact of “Leopoldstadt,” giving us a firmer fix on who’s who, and their relation to one another, and thus the significance of this or that action. Joshua Harmon’s “Prayer for the French Republic” achieved that one year ago at the Huntington. Featuring a total of 11 characters, Harmon chronicled the experiences of a Jewish family in Paris in 1944-1946 and 2016-2017.
That said, there’s a sureness to Perloff’s handling of “Leopoldstadt,” augmented by the exceptional work of the design team: Ken MacDonald (set), Alex Jaeger (costumes), Jane Shaw (sound and original music), Robert Wierzel (lighting), and Yuki Izumihara (projections). In her magnificent biography of Stoppard, Hermione Lee called Perloff “one of the few women directors to work with him regularly,” writing that the two had “an excellent working relationship and a close friendship.” Perloff, a playwright herself, is also the author of “Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View.” (In 2015, Perloff’s “Kinship” premiered at Williamstown Theatre Festival, starring Cynthia Nixon.)
“Leopoldstadt” begins in 1899 with a tableau of domestic warmth in the Merz family’s apartment. A partial list of those on hand includes Emilia (Phyllis Kay), the matriarch; her son, Hermann (Nael Nacer, projecting a compelling force as usual); her daughter, Eva (Rachel Felstein); Hermann’s gentile wife, Gretl (Brenda Meaney), who, unbeknownst to her husband, is having an affair with a young officer named Fritz (Samuel Adams); Jacob, the 8-year-old son of Hermann and Gretl (Quinn Murphy, who will alternate in the role with Elias Wettengel); Ludwig, Eva’s husband (Firdous Bamji); Ludwig’s sister, Wilma (Sarah Corey); and Wilma’s husband, Ernst (Maboud Ebrahimzadeh).
Hermann is confident that assimilation has made Austria’s Jews secure. “We are Austrians now!” he exclaims. “Austrians of Jewish descent.” Ludwig is skeptical, ticking off the signs of persistent antisemitism in Austria and noting how quickly the tide could turn.
That moment arrives (after a scene in 1924) when the action moves to 1938. Here, Stoppard exercises his powers of dramatic distillation. We experience a bone-deep chill as the family is swept up in the anti-Jewish pogrom that became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. The evil represented by the Nazis is embodied by a single paramilitary figure (Samuel Douglas). As he terrorizes the family, then summarily evicts them, his every word and deed make clear the extent to which he sees Jews as less than human.
Stoppard, now 87, was long seen — and saw himself — as the quintessential Britisher. He learned of his Jewish identity in the early 1990s. All four of his grandparents were Jewish and died in concentration camps, as did three of his mother’s sisters.
“I don’t recall ever consciously resisting finding out about myself,” Stoppard told Maureen Dowd of The New York Times in 2022. “It’s worse than that. I wasn’t actually interested. I was never curious enough. I just looked in one direction: forward.”
Near the end of the play, in 1955, there’s a scene of self-indictment as a Stoppard stand-in named Leo (Mishka Yarovoy) is presented with the facts he has tried so hard to bury. He forces himself, finally, to look back.
LEOPOLDSTADT
Play by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Carey Perloff. Presented by The Huntington in association with Shakespeare Theatre Company. At the Huntington Theatre, Boston. Through Oct. 13. Tickets start at $29. 617-266-0800, www.huntingtontheatre.org
Don Aucoin can be reached at donald.aucoin@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeAucoin.