Even second-tier Stoppard can be beguiling

The New York theater community has no lack of either Anglophiles or Tom Stoppard admirers. So when one of the revered playwright’s dramas takes almost 20 years to make the crossing from London in a major production, it seems natural to expect an inferior effort. Like its more intellectually rigorous immediate predecessor in the Stoppard canon, Arcadia, the 1995 play Indian Ink interweaves parallel time periods and narratives to explore the mutability of memory, and this long, meandering work is unquestionably hurt by the comparison. But director Carey Perloff’s lucid staging and her accomplished cast make a persuasive case for what turns out to be an evocative, erotically charged piece of writing. The playwright expanded Indian Ink from his 1991 radio drama In the Native State, which was inspired by his childhood years in 1940s Darjeeling. Relatively straightforward by the standards of Stoppard’s work, it weighs such characteristic concerns as art and love, desire and creativity, considering “the smudge of paint on paper” that people leave behind and the ways in which personal and cultural perceptions, as well as time, can reshape that blurred image.