In this welcome revival of Gilles Ségal's haunting 1983 drama, translated from the French by Tonen Sara O'Connor and first presented in the United States two decades ago, a brilliantly creative Jewish puppeteer and concentration-camp survivor is holed up in an attic room in Berlin in 1950, so traumatized by the horrors he experienced and gripped by paranoia that he is unable to accept that the war is over. Surrounded by his puppets, here the creations of master puppet maker Ralph Lee (founder of the Greenwich Village Halloween parade), he's wracked with guilt and tormented by memories of his gruesome job shoveling corpses into the crematorium, including that of his beloved wife and their unborn child.
On stage for almost two hours straight, Robert Zukerman gives an endlessly inventive, alternately dazzling and heartbreaking tour-de-force performance. He gets excellent support from Suzanne Toren as his sympathetic but increasingly exasperated German landlady, Herbert Rubens as his fellow camp survivor, and Daniel Damiano as a wily German hunter of Nazi war criminals. Director Bruce Levitt keeps the action consistently lively, finding humor where he can and deftly guiding Zukerman through the script's many highs and lows while avoiding the trap of sentimentality. Roman Tatarowicz's imaginative set — a shabby, cluttered attic room framed by draped black curtains and thick floor-to-ceiling ropes — fuses realism and expressionism, a set within a puppet-play set.
Ségal's clear-eyed exploration of the trauma and guilt experienced by genocide survivors and the personal responsibility and day-to-day choices of citizens living under fascism remains vitally important today in a world trying to come to terms with Darfur and other flare-ups of the age-old scourge of ethnic cleansing. And the work's focus on the psychological and emotional price paid by those who fight back in the face of oppression is especially timely as Jews celebrate Hanukkah, which commemorates the Maccabean uprising of the second century B.C.
Presented by Blue Heron Theatre and Mirth A Theatre Company at the ArcLight Theatre, 152 W. 71st St., NYC. Dec. 3-23. Mon., Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.