Can trauma be inherited?

^“It’s serendipity,” Cary Gitter told me.

What the Leonia native was talking about is that rare pairing between an author’s words and the actor who recites them.

Specifically, Mr. Gitter, playwright in residence at the Penguin Rep Theater in Stony Point, N.Y., was talking about his latest work, “The Steel Man,” and Sam Guncler, the actor who stars in the production.

The play, about the struggle between a young man and his troubled and angry father, a survivor still grappling with the aftereffects of the Holocaust, premiered at the Penguin and has now transferred to off-Broadway. It’s playing at the 59E59 theaters.

It came about “thanks to Joe Brancato,” the Penguin’s artistic director, Mr. Gitter said.

“I was talking to Joe a few years ago,” he continued. “I was saying that I wanted to write something about the Holocaust. But the problem was that in my own family, my grandmother was the only one who came to America and survived.

“Her family, they were all killed in Poland by a Nazi death squad. But I knew nothing about them. My grandmother would never talk about it because it was too painful. When I asked her about her family, all she would ever say is ‘Hitler got them.’”

Mr. Brancato suggested that Mr. Gitter talk to Sam Guncler, an actor who had made several appearances at Penguin. “I know Sam,” Mr. Brancato said. “I’ve worked with Sam over the years. He has these very powerful stories about his own childhood with his dad. Why don’t you talk to him?”

Joe played matchmaker. “Sam basically gifted me a portal into the subject matter that I would not have had otherwise,” he said.

The result is a play with emotional and realistic dialogue that will ring true to anyone familiar with the PTSD that survivors suffer. “It reflects my experience,” Mr. Guncler said; the 71-year-old actor suffered both physical and emotional abuse growing up.

“There was never any question that my parents loved me very much,” Mr. Guncler added in a wide-ranging Zoom interview. “But my father was prone to insane rage, and my mom was also very strict. There were occasions where she interposed herself, but, of course, she was a woman of her time.

“They had their ideas about what kids should be able to do and how to do it, and what was proper. You know, I went along with it as much as I could. But every single day something would happen that would set them off.”

Mr. Guncler and Mr. Gitter had a series of meetings. “Cary took these interviews, and I don’t know how, through some sort of alchemy, turned it into this amazing story. This reflects my experience, and I think that of a lot of cultures that suffered generational trauma, not just Jews.”

I asked him if he thinks that trauma can be inherited or is the product of lived experience. “I think it’s from your experience,” he said. “I don’t think it’s in the genes necessarily. But look. Any Jew alive today is here because somewhere down the line someone couldn’t kill us. I really believe for most of us, we have survival in our genes.”

Survival is an instinct that comes in especially handy in show business, a career that had a kind of religious genesis.

Mr. Guncler grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he was a member of Congregation Brith Sholom (and occasionally led it in song). He went to college locally, graduating  from Lehigh University in 1977.  He taught bar and bat mitzvah students, and the summer after he graduated, he studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan.

Back home in Bethlehem, “I was an editor at a magazine working insanely long hours,” he said. “The cantor at my synagogue, David Green, said, ‘You know, they’re auditioning for “Fiddler on the Roof” at a dinner theater and I think you could do that.’

“So that’s what I did.

“I started with a dinner theater production, and everybody said, ‘Wow, you should be doing this more often.’ So I did. And finally, I thought I’m not making any money in journalism. So if I’m making no money, I might do it at a job that’s more fun.”

Eventually Mr. Guncler moved to New York. One of the first things he did was audition for the road company of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy.”

“It was an open audition, and I wanted to meet the casting director,’ he said. “And I loved the play. I kept getting called back again and again, and they finally offered me the role. I was thrilled. My acting teacher, Carole Rosenfeld at HB Studio, was thrilled.

“I  gave up the lease on my apartment. But when my agent called to tell me that I had booked the job, I said, ‘Okay, but let them know that I won’t work on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur,’ because they were coming up pretty soon.

“A week later, after I’d already given up my lease, he called back and said, ‘Well, bad news. They didn’t go for giving you off on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.’

“I said, ‘Okay. Tell them just Yom Kippur. Maybe I’ll work on Rosh Hashanah.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t understand. They went on to the next guy.’ At which point I went to bed for about a week.

“I was blacklisted at that casting agency and with that agent. And word got around that I wasn’t going to work on Rosh Hashanah, on Yom Kippur, on the first night of Pesach, because I wanted to be with my family. It caused a lot of trouble over the years.

“Ironically, over the years, I could go months without getting a phone call, but right before Rosh Hashanah I would get a phone call saying we want you this day. It was like I was being tested.”

Mr. Guncler was tested during this production as well, but in a different way. He plays Leo Geller, the survivor. Leighton Samuels plays his son, Jake, a would-be actor trying to find a peaceful way to tell his father he is moving to New York. And Amanda Kristin Nichols is Christine, Jake’s girlfriend, who is meeting his father for the first time.

“We’d done this show at the Penguin, and when I was getting ready to do it again, I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be easier,’” Mr. Guncler said. “But sitting in the rehearsal, with my stomach going into knots, Joe [Brancato] would reach over and pat me on the shoulder and ask, ‘Are you doing okay?’

“So, yeah, many times, even though the character is fictionalized, my father will sort of jump out at me from my own body.”

“The Steel Man” runs at the 59E59 theater through December 13.