Here’s a couple waving goodbye from the train, but who are they? No idea. That’s why they’re waving goodbye. It’s like a second death, to lose your name in a family album.

Tom Stoppard (The Real Thing, Coast of Utopia) opens the Unterberg Poetry Center’s 84th season with a conversation about Leopoldstadt, his most personal play to date, which comes to Broadway this fall.

He is interviewed by novelist Daniel Kehlmann, who translated Leopoldstadt into German and whose family history, like Stoppard’s own, informed the writing of the play.

“Leopoldstadt feels like an act of personal reckoning for its creator—with who he is and what he comes from,” wrote Ben Brantley. “Here, recollection is a laser, a tool to be focused on a past teeming with harsh and essential lessons for the present. For once in a Stoppard work, words aren’t what leave the most lasting impression. It is instead the vision of people frozen as if for a photograph, beckoning with poignantly immediate life from a distant time before they dissolve into anonymous darkness.”