Text size:

'Primo' is a potent Holocaust saga

BY LINDA WINER | STAFF WRITER

July 12, 2005

Antony Sher performs 'Primo,' based upon the Primo Levi memoir about surviving Auschwitz which Sher adapted for the stage. (Newsday/Ari Mintz)

The man in the promotional photo for "Primo" leans against a gray wall with a faraway look in his eyes and a peculiar placement of his hands. He is a neatly groomed, middle-aged fellow, dressed in the sweater-vest and tie of a professional, perhaps an academic. His hair and beard - more pepper than salt - have been carefully, almost rakishly trimmed.

But what about those hands? The left one is over his chest, almost in the position of a pledge. The right, the one over his crotch, suggests a more instinctive gesture of shame and fear. Oh, and if you study that arm held uneasily near his heart, tattooed numbers tell the story beyond the businesslike blue shirt.

Such is the understated power of "Primo," the 90-minute solo that actor Antony Sher adapted with mesmerizingly ordinary detail from the 1947 memoir by the Italian chemist and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi.

The piece - more narrative docudrama than conventional theater - opened last night at the Music Box Theatre after sold-out runs at London's National Theatre, the West End and in Cape Town, where the South African-born actor had not performed since he left 35 years ago.

Sher, whose 1997 Broadway debut as artist Stanley Spencer emphasized a furious, almost effusively internalized energy, will have none of that showiness in this guide through the unspeakable but well-documented level of hell. Indeed, though stories of the camps now have the familiar churning of myth, Sher's respect for Levi's straightforward and meticulously-detailed observations is both admirable and awesome.

As a witness, Levi can still surprise us. When he was herded into a train from Turin in the last year of the war, the name Auschwitz meant nothing to him. Once there, he was struck by the almost "comic berets and long striped overcoats." The first time he was beaten, he had never known man to "hit without anger." He explains the importance of shoes to survival and the arrival of spring as "one fewer enemy" in a world in which the words for hunger and cold were inadequate.

Oddly, the unsaid in Richard Wilson's production lingers beyond the words. Levi is wearing glasses at the beginning and, behind them, Sher's alert eyes seem never to stop looking around. After an SS man orders the new arrivals to undress and "make a bundle of our clothes," Sher removes his glasses and doesn't wear them again until the end of the play. The eyes stop moving. We don't notice until later that Levi talks in the past tense until the train stops and he is chosen for slave labor on the platform. From there on, we're stuck with him in his now.

Except for his eyeglasses, there is no costume change to telegraph the moment. Sher does travel from gray wall to gray wall (costumes and sets by Hildegard Bechtler). But only once does he address the audience directly. It is after being stripped as "naked as worms" and sheared. He asks us to "think of the value of your smallest possessions ... Think of this. Then you can fully understand the term, "extermination camp."

Every so often, a prison band plays a surreal popular tune or a march. Less effective are the overly-theatrical shadows and mournful music, which cheapen the quality of the manipulation. Levi, who committed suicide in 1987, should be beyond special effects.