Stage

...Set in Berlin in 1950, it takes us into the tortured mind of Samuel Finkelbaum, puppetmaster and survivor of Birkenau...

...And best of all, when Samuel at last parts with his life-size wife, Raymond holds the puppet in his arms, exactly reproducing the stance of the puppet Samuel holding the small version of the wife in the moment of hesitation before he consigned her to the fire...

...Bill Raymond, a veteran of Mabou Mines, is a fine Finkelbaum...

...When Finkelbaum begins to discard his puppets, the stove into which he feeds them becomes the camp crematorium...

...There were a few awkward moments, particularly when the large puppet had to be put in place, but for the most part Raymond handled the puppets as though he had grown up in the trade, which he had not...

...He then kills himself in a false theatrical gesture, doing as a puppet what he thinks he should have done in reality, trying to give his story an ending that is suitably tragic...

...There is a note of desperation in the comedy-in Finkelbaum's attempts to speak quietly, rationally, and in his wryness-for he is a man driven to relive his story and to try to rewrite it in the process...

...The other star of the evening is Robert Smythe, who designed the puppets and directed their use...

...Having escaped from the camp shortly before the end of the war, he has taken refuge in a room rented him by an accommodating landlady (the characters are not to be taken as realistic), where he persists (or pretends to persist) in the conviction that the war has not ended and where he spends his time working on The Tragicomic Life of Samuel Finkelbaum, Puppetmaster, the play with which he plans to astound the world when the war really ends...

...The best images in the play come out of the puppets, and they are the horrifying rather than the comic ones...

...GERALD WEALES...

...Not only is the war not over for Finkelbaum, but it is not over for any of the participants...

...At the end of the play, Schwartzkopf, the man who escaped Birkenau with Finkelbaum, turns up, having answered the landlady's advertisement, to assure Finkelbaum that the war is over and to persuade him to come to Antwerp...

...Much of the business with the puppets is funny, as are the exchanges with the concierge (I cannot imagine why in so idiomatic a translation O'Connor kept the French word), and the visitors she brings to his door in an attempt to convince him that the war is over...

...Finkelbaum agrees, puts his life-size puppet to bed for the last time, begins to destroy the others, but stops with a small puppet of his wife...

...It is now playing at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia in a generally effective staging by Paul Berman with Bill Raymond as the titular protagonist...

...Finkelbaum's quarrel with God-competition with God-is one of the underlying themes of the play...

...He did not kill himself and he did not go mad-as he thinks he would have had there been a God...

...If he ostensibly lets God back into what he sees as a solely human union, he loses him again in the camps...

...There were things to carp about in the play-a subplot that never really seemed to belong-but The Puppetmaster of Lodz was a strong way to begin the new theatrical season, even if the beginning was not in New York...

...Not wanting to be part of a spiritual menage a trois-Samuel, his bride, and God-he carries the astonished young woman away, but (so he tells us: this scene is not enacted), after a chase, he returns to the synagogue and the service...

...In a comic puppet rendition of his wedding, in which the puppet Samuel is equipped with a drawstring that can give him an erection, his sexuality rebels against the occasion...

...It was written by Gilles Segal, a Romanian-born French playwright, actor, and mime, and has been translated by Sara O'Connor, managing director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, where it had its American premiere...

...My detailed account of the play has slighted the performance...

...He commands the stage from the first moment, creating-with a gesture, a look, an intonation-a tragic figure who was meant to be a comedian...

...The cold precision with which he cuts the strings of the prisoners, letting the puppets crumple to the floor, makes the mass deaths more vivid than any human depiction could do on stage...

...At this point Schwartzkopf comes back with the train tickets, but he joins in the repeated "always" and, when the landlady knocks again to remind them that the war is over, it is Schwartzkopf who says, "So they say, so they say," echoing Finkelbaum's words from the beginning of the play...

...At a time when the newspapers are full of the reappearance of anti-Semitism in Russia, in France, even in Madison, Wisconsin, this ending is particularly appropriate...

...In the world of this room, Finkelbaum re-creates himself and those around him, and keeps alive his guilt and his pain...

...He cannot drop her into the stove this time, and he sings that he will be with her always, dancing a little step that recalls the ball scene which he invented as the place they first met...

...He survived presumably because he was one of the men who carried the bodies of the dead to the crematorium, and we are given the scene-with puppets-in which he finds his wife among the dead and, after the immediate reaction of horror, carries her to the fire...

...The life-size puppet at the back of the stage rises from the bed, its wig comes off, and this shaved head evocation of the camps reminds us that all of Finkelbaum's re-creations of his dead wife have given her the rich head of hair she had when they met...

...He has returned to the enclosed world of the room where he can continue to reinvent his past and let his survivor's suffering survive...

...He shares the room with a life-size puppet-the wife who died in Birkenau-with hand puppets that represent him and her and a small galley of other figures, and with string puppets for the prisoners in the camp...

...He rejects God as creator on the assumption that he is jealous of Finkelbaum, who as puppetmaster is a creator who makes the figures and controls their actions...