And yet the most memorable and justifiable works of what we inadequately call Holocaust art - Anne Frank’s diary, Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” the exquisite 1983 Hungarian film “The Revolt of Job” - bear witness by transforming an inhuman era and unimaginable tragedy into something deeply specific and personal. It feels churlish to insist that a play about the Holocaust do more to move or engage me. From the fin-de-siècle opening act to the final reveal about the unspeakable fate of most of the characters, it felt less like a play than a pageant - professional, effective, well-meaning - staged for a Holocaust museum. As Austria becomes increasingly inhospitable to its Jews, characters debate Zionism, Freudianism, the price of assimilation and the persistence of antisemitism in the style of an earnest high school textbook. As staged by the playwright and director Patrick Marber, it is never dull, but rarely compelling. It’s an epically scaled play about the Holocaust, centering on multiple generations of a prosperous assimilated Viennese Jewish family. That’s why I was so disappointed with his latest play, “Leopoldstadt,” which opened on Broadway earlier this month. The characters seem to inhabit the worlds they are recreating onstage, rather than declaiming from a playwright’s overstuffed research files. It helps that Stoppard has always seemed to thoroughly absorb his interests in science, politics and literature before transposing them into drama and comedy. His breakthrough 1966 play, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” is a graduate school-level midrash - an alternate telling - of “Hamlet.” You leave the theater feeling smarter, and maybe just a touch self-satisfied, for just having kept up with the dialogue. His 1993 play “Arcadia” dives deeply into the mathematics of algorithms and fractals.

( JTA) - Tom Stoppard is one of those playwrights who flatters you with his erudition.

Tom stoppard 1966 play