PULLING HEART STRINGS POWER OF 'THE PUPPETMASTER OF LODZ'.

Byline: Reed Johnson Theater Critic

If ``The Puppetmaster of Lodz,'' Gilles Segal's haunting Holocaust drama, had been created as a movie instead of a play, you'd be tempted to make it a silent film.

Not that there's anything amiss with Segal's spare, tragi-comic dialogue, gracefully translated from the original French by Sarah O'Connor. It's just that this Dostoevskian chamber piece, about a reclusive death camp survivor who uses puppets to re-enact the appalling crimes that the Nazis visited on humanity, has the power to move and unsettle an audience in purely visual terms.

At least it does when it's placed in the capable hands of Joe Garcia, the L.A. stage veteran who's reprising his award-winning role as the mentally scarred marionettist, Samuel Finkelbaum, in a revival of the show first staged by Actors Alley five years ago. Ultimately, it is the utter conviction that Garcia brings to his creepy character that makes Jeremiah Morris' production at the new El Portal Center for the Arts raise emotional blisters on an audience's soul.

``Puppetmaster'' marks the debut of the El Portal's 94-seat Circle Theatre, a flexible black box space that's perfect for conjuring the profoundly paranoid world that Finkelbaum, a gaunt Birkenau refugee, inhabits.

The time is 1950, the place Berlin. For the past five years, Finkelbaum has occupied a cramped fourth-floor flat, refusing to believe that World War II has ended, and adamantly resisting the common-sense entreaties of his compassionate concierge (Carol Sigurdson), who brings his groceries and supplies him with newspapers. He also rebuffs a stream of visitors including a Soviet soldier, a rabbi and an American war crimes researcher, none of whom are quite what they seem.

Triple-locking himself behind his apartment walls (the expressionistic skeletal design is by Richard Scully), Finkelbaum spends his days eerily communing with his ``wife'' - an eyeless and mouthless yet frighteningly lifelike rag doll - and a steamer trunk full of grimly realistic marionettes.

Is Finkelbaum truly mad or simply overwhelmed with survivor's guilt? Is his selmprisonment an innocent man's protective fantasy? Or do Finkelbaum's machinations, ever more frantic and disturbing as the play progresses, hint at some ugly personal complicity with his Nazi tormentors?

Garcia's performance, an entertaining fusion of animal cunning, gleeful cynicism and the kind of furtive wariness that Peter Lorre patented, keeps us guessing right up till near the play's memorable climax, which involves a sacrificial immolation set to a recitation of the Song of Solomon.

Garcia's efforts are all the more crucial given the sketchiness of the play's other characters, competently handled by Sigurdson, Henry LeBlanc and Tony C. Burton. For these and other reasons, the production's tone wobbles, keeping the story's horrors from being fully realized. Jerry Grant's original music, which thumps at preset emotional buttons, doesn't help.

Even so, ``The Puppetmaster of Lodz'' sears itself into the brain, leaving an impression that's hard to erase.

The facts

--What: ``The Puppetmaster of Lodz.''

--Where: Actors Alley at the El Portal Center for the Arts, 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.

--When: 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; through March 12.

--Tickets: $20. Call [phone] or Telecharge at [phone].

--Our rating: Three stars

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Photo: Tony C. Burton, top, and Joe Garcia co-star in Gilles' Segal's moving Holocaust drama ``The Puppetmaster of Lodz.''