'Rock' of ages, at the Huntington

Stoppard's journey of music and mind, from Pink Floyd to the Velvet Revolution

''Rock 'n' Roll'' takes place in Prague and Cambridge, England, from 1968 through 1990. It plays at the Boston University Theatre through Dec. 7. (Kevin Berne)

'Rock 'n' Roll" is the ultimate rebuke to anyone who still argues that Tom Stoppard is all head and no heart. It pulses with the energy of a formidable intelligence, to be sure, but also with the unstoppable force of love and desire.

That said, it's also nearly three hours of prickly political arguments, ruminations on Greek poetry, and lessons in Czech history. So it's a real challenge to director and cast: How to get all those words across, and still keep the beat surging through to the end?

The Huntington Theatre Company's co-production with American Conservatory Theater, which first played on ACT's San Francisco stage and has now opened at the Boston University Theatre, faces the challenges head on. Director Carey Perloff has the actors speaking Stoppard's huge paragraphs of speech as quickly and naturally as the rest of us trade small talk. Sometimes this approach serves to keep the ideas at an embraceably human scale; at other times, it blurs their edges so much that we feel as if we're missing the point.

At its best moments, Perloff's staging creates an affecting blend of intellectual engagement and emotional force. With Jan, the Czech student who's a semi-autobiographical stand-in for Stoppard (or, more precisely, for the person Stoppard might have been if he'd stayed in Prague instead of living in England), we live through more than two decades of repression, revolution, and, of course, rock 'n' roll - and, with Jan, we move from seeing it as "only rock 'n' roll" to something more complicated and profound, a real force for social change.

At the same time, crucially, it's still only rock 'n' roll, and Perloff and her actors really get this contradiction: They treat music as metaphor, and they also just listen to it. The pervasive power of rock is subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) underscored by the transitions between scenes, which feature snippets of songs from the Stones, Pink Floyd, the Velvet Underground, and even a scraggly Czech band called the Plastic People of the Universe.

Those songs lend coherence to what might otherwise be dizzying shifts in place and time, from Communist Prague to a sunny garden in England and back again, from 1968 on through to 1990. Within those scenes, however - and perhaps particularly in the Cambridge garden, home to a British Marxist professor who's Jan's estranged mentor and foil - there's no music to fall back on, and it's here that the production hits a rough patch or two.

Jack Willis is a commanding and bearish presence as Max, the professor, but his delivery of Max's tirades on the tarnished beauty of Marxist ideals and the evils of Thatcherism sometimes sacrifices clarity to characterization: Willis makes Max a real human being, but his underplayed delivery of the adamantine rhetoric makes it harder to follow. Similarly, Manoel Felciano gives Jan, especially in his younger days, an appealingly scruffy, shambling demeanor, but his softness means that Jan doesn't hold our focus as forcefully as he should.

As the play moves on through the years, however, both these characterizations deepen and ripen; Max grows at once more disillusioned and more flexible, and Jan - well, Jan grows up, from a diffident youth to a rueful dissident. Meanwhile, the play's focus subtly shifts from its men to its women: first to Max's wife, Eleanor, gravely ill with cancer, and then to their daughter, Esme, and her own daughter, Alice.

It's these women - along with another Czech student, Lenka - who move most swiftly toward the understanding the story provides. It's Lenka who reduces that understanding to a single sentence: " 'Make love, not war' was more important than 'Workers of the world unite.' " But all the women, with gentle insistence, embody that emphasis on the centrality of love: Eleanor pleads for it, in one of the play's most moving speeches, while Esme gropes her way toward it, not seeing until it's almost too late the love that has waited for her all along.

Stoppard calls for one actress to play both those parts - the mother in Act 1, the grown daughter in Act 2 - while a second actress plays first young Esme, then the grown Esme's daughter. Here Rene Augesen plays Eleanor and then Esme; in both roles, she seems initially too frail, too fluttery, but she musters a vital inner strength when it counts. Her performance doesn't erase the memory of Sinead Cusack's on Broadway, any more than Felciano can compete with Rufus Sewell, but in their best moments they find their own brand of integrity and, yes, heart in these complicated people.

The Huntington production certainly can compete with anyone's in the ambition of its design. Douglas W. Schmidt's set starts as a vertiginous tunnel of dingy gray walls, narrowing toward the pale gray light of a winter sky at the back wall, then makes room for a whole wisteria-draped garden on one side, and a grungy apartment crammed with LPs on the other, to glide in for their respective scenes - all while dizzying projections of the passing dates whirl in the background.

It's vast - maybe even a little too vast, as it sometimes threatens to dwarf the humans in its space. But that's not wrong, either. Stoppard is writing not just about a few human lives, but about human life; about political currents, not just romantic ones; about history as well as stories. If this production doesn't always keep us focused just where we should be on one or the other, it gives us enough powerful moments, both large and small, to rock our world.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.