<p>It’s easy to think British playwright Tom Stoppard lived a charmed life. He was the toast of the West End, and his writing garnered some of theater’s most prestigious awards, from the Oliviers to the Tonys to an Oscar.</p><p>Even Stoppard said his life was charmed, until he began wrestling late in life with a reckoning — numerous family members had been killed in Holocaust, and his Jewish identity was something he hadn’t yet tried to understand.</p><p>This scrutiny of his own history fueled his final play, “Leopoldstadt,” a Herculean undertaking for any theater company with its original cast of 38, five acts and five decades of familial history. Before his death in 2025, Stoppard mined his own biography with the help of his friend and frequent collaborator, director Carey Perloff, who through August will stage a slightly scaled down version of the work in its Midwest Premiere at Writers Theatre in Glencoe.</p><div class="Enhancement" data-align-center> <div class="Enhancement-item" data-crop=""> <figure class="Figure"><a class="AnchorLink" id="image-a40000" name="image-a40000"></a> <picture data-crop="medium"> <source type="image/webp" width="490" height="275" data-srcset="https://cst.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/0447c2e/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2500x1403+0+179/resize/490x275!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchorus-production-cst-web.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com%2Fbrightspot%2Fe9%2F96%2F3c4b426d429b841d45d8d0667b71%2Fap23163136255637.png 1x,https://cst.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/97735c7/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2500x1403+0+179/resize/980x550!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchorus-production-cst-web.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com%2Fbrightspot%2Fe9%2F96%2F3c4b426d429b841d45d8d0667b71%2Fap23163136255637.png 2x" data-lazy-load="true" srcset="data:image/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciIHZlcnNpb249IjEuMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIyNzVweCIgd2lkdGg9IjQ5MHB4Ij48L3N2Zz4=" /> <source width="490" height="275" data-srcset="https://cst.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/b00a8d5/2147483647/strip/true/crop/2500x1403+0+179/resize/490x275!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchorus-production-cst-web.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com%2Fbrightspot%2Fe9%2F96%2F3c4b426d429b841d45d8d0667b71%2Fap23163136255637.png" data-lazy-load="true" srcset="data:image/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciIHZlcnNpb249IjEuMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIyNzVweCIgd2lkdGg9IjQ5MHB4Ij48L3N2Zz4=" /> <img class="Image" alt="Tom Stoppard poses with the award for best play for &quot;Leopoldstadt&quot; in the press room at the 76th annual Tony Awards on Sunday, June 11, 2023, at the Radio Hotel in New York.