NEW YORK — I can’t recall the last time I broke down with the brutal release I felt at the conclusion of “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s anguishing portrait of a Viennese Jewish family consumed by the flames of Nazi persecution and mass murder. My response felt entirely emotional — quite a departure for a playwright over whom I’m far more accustomed, in plays such as “Travesties” and “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” to be left dazzled by Olympic-caliber verbal gymnastics.
I also know from long experience that every Holocaust work ends, spiritually or physically or philosophically, at Auschwitz. But that knowledge — and Stoppard’s immersing an audience in a story whose every plot point essentially has been documented before — did not prevent me from erupting in heaving sobs after 2 hours and 10 minutes in the Longacre Theatre, where the play marked its official opening Sunday night.
Perhaps what moved me so was the pain layered on in delicate brushstrokes in this fictionalized account, which was deeply influenced by Stoppard’s later-in-life discovery of his own Jewish roots. Or maybe it was the breathtaking dexterity of director Patrick Marber’s meticulously acted production, which propels 30 cast members across more than a half-century of harrowing events. Or it could simply have been the mournful tally of the losses at play’s end, rendered as a roll call of the dead and the manners in which each of their lives ended.
“Suicide,” an actor reports after a character’s name is recited. The litany goes on and on: “Transport ... Dachau ... Death march.” And yes, repeatedly, “Auschwitz.”
I’ve omitted the characters’ names here, because you’ll want to take the full journey with them, knowing and yet not knowing what tragedies await them. Stoppard is endlessly intrigued by questions of fate, chance, coincidence, in history as well as in love, and in “Leopoldstadt,” he examines the unfathomably heartbreaking consequence of an entire people trapped in a common fate and caught between the expectation that things can’t get worse, and the fact that things do.
Jewishness as an inexorable facet of identity — whether it’s embraced, rejected or buried — is a concept aswirl in the intermissionless production. The 85-year-old Stoppard only learned the extent of his own Jewish heritage in midlife; if not an apparently life-changing revelation for him, then certainly as a dramatist of nonpareil curiosity, a natural springboard for elucidation on a stage.
The playwright follows the characters of “Leopoldstadt” through successive generations, starting in 1899 in the household of an affluent Jewish family so comfortably assimilated into Austrian life that it celebrates Christmas. The narrative leaps to the 1920s and the aftershocks of World War I — embodied most potently by Seth Numrich as Jacob, a horribly injured young veteran — and then to the late 1930s, after Hitler annexes Austria and the floor drops out of the family’s hopes. The final movement occurs in 1955, when the handful of family survivors gathers in the looted ancestral home in Vienna; one of them, Leo (the terrific Arty Froushan), who had escaped as a child to a life of privileged bliss in England, is compelled to face the harsh inquiries of two other survivors, Rosa and Nathan (Jenna Augen and Brandon Uranowitz, both superb).
“Being made British was the greatest good fortune that could ever have happened to me,” Leo says, a declaration that speaks to the inscrutable forces that spare some people in the path of annihilation, and condemn others.
In the turn-of-the-20th-century scenes, set designer Richard Hudson creates the sort of luxe environment that envelops the family persuasively in a false sense of permanent security, and costume designer Brigitte Reiffenstuel dresses the ensemble in warmly appealing bourgeois finery. Across the board, the performances earn your compassion — clearly, a family album in which Stoppard wanted us to invest our most profound sympathies.
David Krumholtz, Betsy Aidem, Eden Epstein, Caissie Levy and Sara Topham are among the other actors who expertly bring to life Stoppard’s panoramic survey of lives lived vibrantly, then turned to dust. As in such devastating documents as Anne Frank’s diary and “Schindler’s List,” you can’t help but follow along helplessly, and grieve.
Leopoldstadt, by Tom Stoppard. Directed by Patrick Marber. Sets, Richard Hudson; costumes, Brigitte Reiffenstuel; lighting, Neil Austin; sound and original music, Adam Cork; projections, Isaac Madge. With Betsy Aidem, Faye Castelow, Eden Epstein, Arty Froushan, Aaron Neil, Sara Topham. About 2 hours 10 minutes. At Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St., New York. telecharge.com. 212-239-6200.
