Do we really need another Holocaust drama? That question percolates throughout the experience of watching Our Class, a nearly three-hour drama playing at the Classic Stage Company in a production imported from Igor Golyak’s Arlekin Players Theatre (which performed it at BAM earlier this year). Certainly, the recent rise in antisemititic violence as well as Holocaust denialism underscores the need to bring the facts of that horrific and historic genocide to modern audiences, particularly younger ones. And the story at the center of Our Class is a true one — or mostly true, given playwright Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s use of composite characters. We follow 10 residents of a small Polish town, five Catholics and five Jews, who meet as schoolchildren in the early 1930s before the invasion of the Soviets, and then the Nazis, tears all of their lives asunder.

Golyak brings a lot of directorial flourish and showy stage craft to the tragedy, from a meta-framing device in which the cast holds scripts as if doing a table read to the use of animated projections and live video feeds. Both the back wall and main floor of the set (designed by Jan Pappelbaum) has been turned into a giant school blackboard where the cast scribbles everything from their names to the Soviet hammer-and-sickle to swastikas, as well as frames for Golyak and Eric Dunlap’s animated projections.

The visuals keep us engaged, but they occasionally become a distraction that distances us from the horrors by turning upsetting events into abstract metaphors. Take the beating death of young Jakub (Stephen Oshsner), whose Christian ex-classmates draw a chalk outline around his body, upright against the upstage blackboard wall, and then hit him with chalk pellets and pelt soccer balls around him. Or the massacre of the sweet wannabe movie star Dora (Gus Birney) and her newborn child, who is locked in a barn (along with virtually all of the town’s remaining Jews) that is then set ablaze. The stage is strewn with weighted helium balloons with magic-markered faces drawn on them, each representing another life whose connection to Earth is snipped out in an instant. But it’s almost too pretty an image to bring home the scale of a savage act that killed an estimated 1,600 human lives in one fiery night.

The most compelling story to emerge is the unlikely union of working-man Pole Wladek (Ilia Volok) and the Jewish girl he pursues, and protects, despite the consequences. Rachelka (Alexandra Silber) is a realist who agrees to marry Wladek, even converting to Catholicism and taking the name Marianna, and endures a Grand Guignol wedding whose gifts turn out to be the looted belongings of her slaughtered Jewish family, friends, and neighbors. Throughout, she wears a mask of lipstick-smudged stoicism, her instinct for survival barely suppressing her true feelings. “He’s dumb but he saved my life,” she tells us. “We Jews, we’ve survived such things before.”

She’s a character that we long to hear more from — especially in the overlong second act, when we learn that she chose to stay with Wladek to the end. Since there are so many characters to follow, it can be a little hard to distinguish between them — and sometimes to pick up their dialogue given the bigos-thick accents and sound design (by Ben Williams). Instead, we get snippets about the lives of those who survived the war that play out as unsatisfying portraits of denial, obfuscation, and thwarted acts of revenge. (There are only so many ways to shade “I was just following orders.”)

Do we really need another Holocaust drama? Yes. There’s no denying that Our Class has a compelling story to tell — perhaps especially in this moment when Jewish lives feel under threat in ways that we have not seen in decades. And the show generates images, visual metaphors, that will linger in my memory. But despite the intimate space of the Classic Stage theater, I was more impressed by the stage craft than moved by the story at the heart of Our Class. And that feels like a missed opportunity.

OUR CLASS
Classic Stage Company, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes (1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through Nov. 3