“I didn’t want my plays to just dwindle away to short pieces as though I’d run out of steam.” He stops and thinks. “I wanted to write a big play,” Stoppard says.

It traces a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna from 1899 to 1950, from prominence to oblivion, from struggling to assimilate to struggling to preserve their Jewish identity, from wealthy arts patrons to having their contributions erased. The vagaries of memory and how people fare in the erratic habits of history is one theme at the heart of Stoppard’s newest play, Leopoldstadt, which opens on Broadway on Oct 2. The anti-Semitic name change incident will forever loom large in the way he is remembered. Very little else is known of Kenneth Stoppard, except that he was a major in the military and an ardent Anglophile. That version of the tale appeared in Stoppard’s authorized biography and in many of the profiles of him since. And his stepfather-essentially the only father he remembers-made the request in a letter, to which the English language’s most famous living playwright replied that it would be impractical. The argument in that story took place days after the funeral. But he’s told it before, in an article he wrote for Talk magazine in 1999.

At least, that’s how Stoppard tells the story now.

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