Shatteringly powerful is the best way I can describe The Dentist, the one-woman show now playing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Starring Razia Israely, the monologue proved to be one of the best things I've ever seen in the theater, drama of a rare and memorable quality.
Israely plays a woman whose Jewish-Greek father was arrested in WW II by the Nazis and shipped from his Thessaloniki home to the infamous concentration camp of Auschwitz. The father somehow survived the experience and, once the war ended, managed to build a life for himself again, marrying and having two children.
It wasn't a happy life, though. Beset by fear, guilt and resentment, given to savage bursts of rage, he abused not only his wife but his teenage children, whom he often tied up in a dark basement when he left the house. The marriage didn't last. His wife filed for divorce, taking the children with her. Unlike her mother and brother, though, the narrator refused to hate her father. Not only did she remember the warm, loving things about him, she was driven by a need to understand him, come to grips with the reasons for his rage and abuse.
She sets out on a personal journey of discovery, seeking out the handful of people who were friendly with her late father, including a fellow Greek who was with him in the camps. What she learns is that the two of them were sonderkomandos - special helpers to the Nazis who were forced by them to do the horrific work in the crematoriums of stacking and burning the dead bodies. Her father was then given an even worse task, one which plunged him deeper into the camp's circles of hell.
In all the years she knew her father, he never once talked about his experiences in the camps. It is only now, long after his death, that she can finally come to understand and forgive him.
Israely gives a tour-de-force performance in The Dentist, and her magnificent acting is matched by the superbly written and staged
script. The Dentist's theme of reconciliation and compassion in the face of unmitigated evil is fully realized in this deeply moving, unforgettable play.
