VARIETY on PRIMO - spoilers

[do_re_milla]

Posted: 7/12/05 at 11:22am

VARIETY critic David Rooney tells us that Primo Levi's books are remarkable not only for their humanity and compassion but for their "analytical detachment, channeling the practicality and precision of a scientific technician through simple, direct language to describe the horrors he endured.

As adaptor and actor, Sher has meticulously crafted a clear-headed correlation to Levi's approach... The play is as much a documentary lecture as a theatrical monologue, in which Sher serves as an emphatically unemotional guide through a kind of darkness unimaginable for most people."

Rooney writes that even when Levi shares with us the most terrifying experiences, that Primo gives the resemblance of a "scholar or anthropologist, observing his surroundings, his cohabitants, captors, even himself and his suffering from outside."

Rooney gives a description of Sher as usually being a far showier, larger stage presence. But Sher's restraint on stage allows the horror of Primo's experiences and the extraordinary dignified manner with which he confronts them to permeate one in unexpected ways. "This kind of controlled perf must surely be as emotionally exhausting for an actor as the most fully loaded tragedian turn -- perhaps even more so."

Rooney goes on to say that Sher's controlled tone only occasionally got louder with "anxiety, fear or a tremble of anger." And his measured rate of progressing his story gets faster only in the home stretch. Here, Levi describes the oblivion of death & apathy as hestitatingly giving way to an urgency of hope after the Nazis flee. Primo describes the arrival of four Russian cavalrymen with quite observation of the shame and guilt on his liberators' smileless faces is deeply affecting. To think that only a generation or 2 prior to this liberation, the ancestors of those liberating soldiers may have participated in pogroms makes this description of the event even more startling to me.

The critic then points to other remembrances which are more distressing, like the chilling description of the Selekcja, during which those who are condemned are sorted from those to be spared by a simple left or right turn; or the humiliating experience of working with pristine Aryan girls in the lab, who gossip, smoke their cigarettes and file their nails all the time turning up their noses at the "Stink-jude."

Milla