The British stage actor, Sir Antony Sher, came on Charlie Rose program to discuss his one-man show about Primo Levi, the Italian chemist who turned to writing after his survival at Auschwitz. Even the brief clips of Sher's performance are very intense.
What intrigued me was Sher's experience with stage fright late in his career. "It's quite common with serious actors who have been at their craft for a long time. Olivier had it so badly that the rest of the company (at The National) was instructed not to make eye contact with him. It would terrify him. He felt the actors were judging him"
Sher described his own terror: "I could hear my own voice delivering the lines to the audience but another voice in my ear would say, "You're going to screw this up. You're going to make a botch of it. You're going to blow it. Then a third voice would start shouting, contradicting the second voice. There was all this racket going on in my head. What causes it? It's an Inner Demon."
"And how did you make it stop?" Charlie asked.
"By doing a one-man show."
I wasn't familiar with Levi's writing. Now, I think I'll pursue his books. He committed suicide, by the way, pitching himself down a stairwell in Turin 40 years after his Auschwitz liberation.
"It wasn't the camp that caused his death," said Sher. "It was his lifetime bout with clinical depression -- something he had before he was caught by the Nazis." Curiously, his depression vanished while he was in the concentration camp. Survival became everything. But it returned after the war.
Despite the so-called racial laws, Primo Levi managed to complete his degree in chemistry at the University of Turin in 1941. But he had difficulty finding work. And two years later, when the Germans invaded northern Italy, Levi fled to the mountains with a pearl-handled pistol, joining
an ineffectual band of partisans.
"I was twenty-four," he would recall, "with little wisdom, no experience, and a decided tendency -- encouraged by the life of segregation forced on me for the previous four years by the racial
laws -- to live in an unrealistic world of my own, a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phantoms ..."
Captured at once by a troop of Fascist militia, Levi soon found himself crossing the Brenner Pass in a cattle car, en route to a location whose name had not yet acquired its terrible, latter-day
resonance: Auschwitz.
I once had a memorable breakfast with Joe Bologna in a greasy spoon in -- of all places -- Northridge, California. He talked about acting and the nature of fear. Growing up in Brooklyn, he considered becoming a priest. His father shined shoes in Wall Street and saved enough money
to send Joe to Brown to become an architect.
I wrote this in my Examiner column, January 2004: Joe Bologna & Renée Taylor performed "It Had to Be You" at the Cal State Northridge Theater yesterday here in chilly Southern California. The house was packed.
"These are wonderful audiences in the San Fernando Valley," said Renée. "People come from all over." The couple wrote the show over 20 years ago. But its tenderness and insight into human vulnerabilities transcend the vagaries of fashion. In a characteristic Taylor/Bologna theme, two strangers find redemption through chaos and rediscovery. It’s a very funny and very touching show.
But “It Had to Be You” had to be funny.
“You don’t cut funny,” said Bologna’s character in “My Favorite Year.” But there’s always the poignancy. “I used to have trouble with sexuality when I was young,” Joe said before the matinee. “I just didn’t like how it made me feel vulnerable. I considered becoming a priest, but then I had too many questions about God."
He would have been a very funny priest. …
Which reminds me of the old joke: "How do you make God laugh? Just tell Him your plans."
And now a final word on parrots (from "My Favorite Year"):
Rookie, your Meatloaf Mindanao was superb!
Rookie Carroca: Thanks. That takes two days to prepare, you know.
Really! Tell me, what was that rather pungent taste?
Rookie Carroca: Parrot!
-someone spits up and Aunt Sadie swoons-
Rookie Carroca: And they're not easy to work with. They put up some squawk.
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