BROADWAY REVIEW: In breathtaking ‘Leopoldstadt,’ an aging Tom Stoppard unlocks his own survivor’s guilt

The incomparable Tom Stoppard has, over a half century of writing for the British and American theater, explored sex, mathematics, aesthetics and the wackiness of life on the margins.

But his last major play — or so he has implied, at 82 years old — comes home to the most personal question clearly still swirling around his mind: Was the erasure of his identity justified or an immoral act?

Erasure is what happened to Stoppard, born Tomáš Sträussler, when his mother married an Englishman, changed her son’s name and brought him up as British. She wanted him to survive and thrive; demonstrably he did. But what of those Middle-European Jews destroyed amid the anti-Semitic tumult of the 20th century? What of them?

Ergo, the breathtaking “Leopoldstadt,” a play that asks what we owe our own imperfect memories.

“Leopoldstadt,” which opened on Broadway Sunday night at the Longacre Theatre in a gorgeously sculpted and acted production directed by Patrick Marber, plays in front of an audience listening so intently that it barely moves a collective muscle.

The work is suffused with survivors’ guilt. It had many in the audience dialing back in their own family trees to figure out who had suffered and even died for them. I looked around in the dark and I swear I saw it happening. I was doing it myself.

Stoppard is not the first major playwright to pen a revealing bookend late in life. Arthur Miller finally wrestled with what he did to Marilyn Monroe in “Finishing the Picture,” Stephen Sondheim declared his own much-delayed romantic happiness in “Road Show.” Both ended their careers with the content of their own hearts.

But “Leopoldstadt” is an epic, formatively brilliant work, set in the same room in Vienna but sprawling across decades and generations as it follows two affluent Jewish families connected by marriage. Led by the central character Hermann Merz (David Krumholtz) and his Catholic wife Gretl (Faye Castelow), along with sister Eva (Caissie Levy) and her husband Ludwig (Brandon Uranowitz), the group first is allowed to dominate Austrian culture, science and math, gorging on the pleasures of all three in a beautiful home off the Ringstrasse, only to find itself ripped from the belly of the city as former friends become Nazis at their door.

“Leopoldstadt” (the title is taken from the first Jewish quarter of Vienna) is recognizably a verbose Stoppard play. Like “Arcadia,” with which it has resonance, it explores the pleasures of mathematics as a mode of expression and its characters’ longing for love or happiness invariably collides with the raging intellectual war inside their own heads.

But for those of us who have watched all of this great writer’s singular career, this capstone is something apart. Stoppard clearly loves these characters and fears for them at every moment. That deeply arresting emotional key, added to the play’s predictable intelligence, is what makes the work feel so important.

The work explores the long history of anti-Semitism and its impact on Middle-European Jewry of multiple nations. The play begins in 1899 with a Christmas tree in the room as two Jewish families connected by marriage try to welcome members who have married outside the faith, and the whole play is filled with people talking about how (to paraphrase Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof”) they want to bend but not break. And the play forcibly argues that Austrians weren’t so much the Nazis’ first victims as its willing collaborators who quickly scrubbed their own past so they could conduct an orchestra again.

Marber’s production has enough energy and forward motion to ensure that the emphasis on character does not impede its dramatic intensity. And he helps make it easier to follow (it’s not always easy to recall who is related to whom, as the years spin on to 1955). But the unfussy direction also lets everyone talk, emote, kvetch and, of course, go on with their lives as best as they can.

I think I’ll remember this show the most for how it uses a family album, clutched to the chest of succeeding generations of women, variously fascinated by various new photographic technologies as a tool for remembering. The album, the repository, is held close in forced evacuation, although we intuit it won’t make it to Auschwitz.

Displaced persons, and there are many communities of such, invariably have the markers of their memories forcibly erased. The question of the play is how to counteract that.

A character observes that to have your identity forgotten in a family photo, viewed by successive generations, is to “die a second death.” Surely, we all hope to keep death down to once. For ourselves, and those we love.

It takes work in this world.