Pulling Emotional Strings : Theater: New York actor Robert Zukerman draws on family history for his performance of a Holocaust survivor who refuses to come out of hiding after the war.

New York-based actor Robert Zukerman turned down the starring role in “The Puppetmaster of Lodz” at San Diego’s Blackfriars Theatre when first asked to play it nearly two years ago.

Zukerman remembers his mind racing through all the reasons to say “no”: “It’s 3,000 miles away, my wife will kill me, my daughter won’t recognize me,” Zukerman told Blackfriars artistic director Ralph Elias.

Besides, Zukerman, 41, had other jobs then--jobs that paid the bills the way assorted acting stints generally don’t. A job teaching theater at Hunter College in New York. A job behind a desk at the New York State Council of the Arts.

But when the show was postponed, and Elias tried him again last summer, Zukerman was willing. He had just been laid off from his job at the New York State Council of the Arts, and to do the part, he quit his teaching job and turned down other acting offers, including a chance to perform in “Coriolanus” in Washington, D.C., and a part in a murder mystery that would have taken him to Singapore. He even talked his wife into backing him up, even though initially she was “lukewarm at best.”

But, despite the fact that there’s no guarantee of the success of this show, which opens Sunday in the 78-seat Bristol Court Playhouse, the puppet master’s role was one he couldn’t refuse.

Now, after seven months of preparation, he’s in San Diego, and last week he talked passionately about the Blackfriars’ production of “Puppetmaster.”

“And very possibly (after the show closes) I’ll be back in New York on April 13 and won’t be able to be arrested for a couple of years,” Zukerman now says, with a shrug.

Zukerman said he took the part because he found it “extraordinary.” Playing the puppet master not only is a virtuosic challenge for an actor, but the role also touches Zukerman deeply as both an artist and a Jew.

“The Puppetmaster of Lodz” tells the story of a puppeteer, Samuel Finkelbaum, who escaped from Birkenau, a Nazi concentration camp. But in 1950, five years after the war ended, Finkelbaum still won’t come out of hiding in a German apartment where he’s made his home, and he refuses to accept that peacetime has really arrived. Nothing his landlady or a series of sympathetic visitors say can persuade him otherwise.

Finkelbaum has lost all trust for those around him; instead, he obsessively plays with his puppets, using them to tell his own story over and over.

“The Puppetmaster of Lodz” was written by Gilles Segal, a well-known French

actor and writer, who was born in Romania in 1929 and escaped the Nazis as a teen-ager by hiding out in a cellar. The play had its American premiere at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre in 1988, where managing director Sara O’Connor first translated “Le Marionettiste de Lodz.” It received rave reviews there and later played at the Empty Space Theatre in Seattle.

Part of the challenge for Zukerman is the fact that Finkelbaum is on stage for the full 90-minute piece--with no intermission--and a lot of his acting is done using the puppets, whose voices he also provides.

And while the story explores issues of life and death, as well as man’s ability to maintain sanity in an insane world, the role also requires skills of mimicry, mime and comedy. Finkelbaum, despite everything that has happened to him, is a very funny, bright and highly creative man. Zukerman even describes him as “a joyful guy--a mercurial character who could be dancing one minute and remembering the camp the next.”

“This is a role that has a lot of humor, a lot of intensity and a lot of characters. I am a character actor. I’ve studied a lot of mime and have good friends that are puppeteers. Plus the Jewish side of the role appealed to me. The character is a Holocaust survivor and I have several cousins who are Holocaust survivors. But his struggle as a Jewish artist, I hope, is also something I can ascend to.”

Zukerman, a thin, wiry fellow who comes across as high-energy, high-intensity and funny, emphasizes that this is not just a Holocaust play.

“It’s more of a Pirandellian play because it deals with truth and illusion, madness and insanity,” he said.

O’Connor, the play’s translator, echoes these sentiments: “This isn’t a play about a sad little victim of the Holocaust,” O’Connor said from her Milwaukee Rep office. “It’s about a man spitting in the face of God because He blew it.”

And yet Zukerman has dug deeply into his own roots to summon up the emotions of the Holocaust.

“I have a cousin who has the Auschwitz (concentration camp) tattoo,” he said softly. “I have two close cousins, one of whom was from Lodz (the Polish town where the puppeteer is from) and the other from Buchenwald (another concentration camp).

“I’ve used some of them in aspects of the characters. Some of the speech is part of one cousin, another character is a bit of my grandmother. A good performance will be a pastiche, a collage of things that are brought together.”

Zukerman was born in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where his mother still lives. His late father was a doctor, who served in a mobile hospital unit in Europe during World War II. Zukerman’s father expected his son to follow him in medicine, but the young Zukerman earned a doctorate in theater history instead.

Interrupting his studies in 1973, Zukerman went briefly to Paris to study with mime Etienne Decroux, who had taught Jean-Louis Barrault, Marcel Marceau and, coincidentally, the playwright, Segal. Not long after Zukerman arrived in Paris, the Yom Kippur War broke out, and he went to Israel, where he worked for months on a kibbutz, helping keep the country going while others fought the war.

When he returned to the United States to complete his studies, Zukerman met Elias, for whom he understudied in a Washington Arena Stage production of “The Dybbuk” in Washington, D.C.

Now, ironically, the two are working together again on a production that explores Jewish experience. Zukerman said that he believes that there is increasing anti-Semitism in the world today, which has made the role all the more important to him.

To further heighten his identification with his character, Zukerman has immersed himself in what he calls a very “Finkelbaumish” existence since he arrived in San Diego.

“I’ve been living for the last three weeks closeted in my room. I have not seen anything of San Diego. Mostly I’m just doing my bits while I’m eating and rehearsing. Sometimes, when I’m in the bathroom and it’s two in the morning and I’m doing these voices and making faces, I can imagine some of that which is Finkelbaum,” he said with a smile.

When Zukerman does go out, he looks at everything through the prism of his part. The movie “Europa Europa,” a true story of a young Jewish boy who eluded the Nazis by pretending he was one of them, recently inspired him to re-examine his own role in “Puppetmaster.” He also trains himself by reading other writers on the experience of the Holocaust: Anne Frank, Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, whose “Night” is an autobiographical story of Auschwitz.

And as Zukerman draws from others, he continues to draw from himself. This part has not just defined his life for the past seven months, it has taken it over--but Zukerman has no regrets.

“It’s probably the best opportunity I’ve ever had. What defines a great role is something that allows you to keep discovering more and more gold, finding more depths--spiritual and emotional--and not get bored.”

Performances of “The Puppetmaster of Lodz,” presented by the Blackfriars Theatre are at 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and occasional 7 p.m. Sundays with Sunday matinees at 2 through April 12. There will be four Thursday post-performance forums Feb. 27, March 12, March 26 and April 9. Tickets are $14-$18. At the Bristol Court Playhouse, 1057 First Ave., San Diego, 232-4088.