Finding the Laughter
Dina Panozzo is one of the more characterful characters of Australian theatre: archetypally Italian in her ebullience, easy laughter and bubbling passion for life, food and family. Behind the sparkle, however, is a deceptively thoughtful and perceptive woman: the Panozzo waters are rarely still, but they run deep. It's a mix that she brings to the role of Bessie, an elderly Jewish survivor of the Holocaust in James Sherman's bittersweet comedy From Door To Door.
"The beauty of playing Bessie is that she's a survivor," says Panozzo. "It's set in Chicago and she is from Europe, post-war - World War II - and what she has been through is unbelievable. I didn't understand it, I have to admit I really had no idea. You know what my research was? I went to the Jewish Museum."
The Darlinghurst museum is dedicated not only to the 30,000 post-war immigrants to Australia, but also to the history and culture of those who made the journey from the beginning of European settlement. On Sundays, Panozzo discovered, visitors can learn firsthand from a volunteer guide.
"I met a wonderful old lady - Lotte - I think she was originally from Poland because she had been at Auschwitz. She has a number tattooed here," Panozzo indicates the inside of her forearm. "And she told me this devastating story of losing everybody - all her family - and through it all she was so funny. I hardly stopped laughing and I realised that all those cliches about Jewish humour are true! And the Jewish grandmother in the play isn't a caricature - she's for real."
Panozzo shrugs expressively, adopts a chicken soup Russian-Chicago accent and says: "What can I say? Oy vey!"
Panozzo's career has been a rich one, to date, with credits that include appearances in movies including The Man Who Sued God and Love's Brother, TV roles in Headland, Water Rats, White Collar Blue, Wildside, GP, Mission Impossible, A Country Practice and Acropolis Now Stage credits include Kimberley Akimbo, Love and Magic in Mamma's Kitchen, A Little Like Drowning, SOS, Dreams in an Empty City, Peter Pan, A Touch of Silk, Richard III, Sisters and The Impostors - as well as the show she wrote and directed Varda Che Bruta - Poretta (Look How Ugly She is - Poor Thing). Now, after a break of several years for child-rearing, Panozzo is back on stage, at the age of 51 playing Bessie, a woman who ages from 35 to 91 during the course of the play.
Bessie has a daughter and a granddaughter and the very different experiences of the three generations of women are the backbone of the play whose title is a reference to a Hebrew prayer which goes: "l'dor v'dor," meaning "from generation to generation."
[page]"The generational thing is interesting," says Panozzo. "The daughter has grown up in America and experiences the beginnings of feminism; the granddaughter is much more conventional again. She has the choices the mother and grandmother didn't have - but she doesn't. That's a funny thing isn't it? I see it here, now. It drives me crazy, these girls who think feminism was so ... but what do they know. But they'll find out what the alternative is if they're not careful."
As an actor Panozzo is all too aware of the effects on her industry of conservatism, something she calls: "Ten years of Howard."
She goes on: "We're scraping away at nothing. I was so lucky to grow up when I did - we had Don Dunstan, we had people who cared about the arts, who understood the importance of artists to Australia ..." she sighs, then grins. "I sound like the mother - it is the generation thing. You know I was talking to my mother the other day - and she's the immigrant, the adult who came to Australia, and we were talking about food and she said (try for a ragu-rich Italian accent here) 'Dina, I should have had a restaurant. Look at how they love all that peasant food - polenta, gnocchi - I coulda given 'em cheap food at expensive prices' and we laughed."
Food and family are intertwined in From Door To Door - which Panozzo sums up as "It seems like a little domestic drama, but the demons come up and you have the battles - tradition versus modern, old country and new country. It's about the power of ordinariness and the power of women. And probably because what's underlying it all is so serious, it's actually very funny. That's the amazing thing about the Jewish sense of humour I think - that pain should twist into humour. It's a miracle."
Panozzo is familiar with miracles. In the SBS TV series Mum's the Word she described her efforts to have a child. She was 38 and the clock was ticking. "I did Chinese herbs, hung upside-down, did this, did that, stuck this, put that, rubbed yam cream ... everything in the world." Pregnancy followed pregnancy and all ended in miscarriage. Typically, Panozzo looked at her predicament square in the eye and began public speaking to women about loss and grief. It not only helped her come to terms with the reality but also to move to the next step: she and her husband, television producer Phillip Tanner, began the long process of adoption.
"It was four years," she recalls. "We were at a funeral when we got the word. Isn't that something? One life ends and another begins. To me I became a mother when I saw the photograph. He was from Guatemala and just two years old."
Luis, now nine years old, is spookily like his mother: outgoing, into everything and - until he got bored with it - a great cook, as kids around the world would know from the award winning Nickelodeon TV series Cooking for Kids - with Luis.
[page]"It just happened," says Panozzo. "I don't want anyone to think we tried to push him into anything. He loved cooking with my mother and he was incredibly dextrous - ambidextrous really - and he was just so natural. So there was an episode of Cooking with Nonna - that's my mother - and fruit kebabs in Cairns with his Aussie cousins. Then we did a Guatemalan cheesecake, to celebrate where he comes from. It was fun."
And caught the eye of none other than Oprah Winfrey whose producer rang to ask if Luis would like to appear on the show. Protective mother Dina wasn't keen, but it was Luis who made the decision.
"He just said - no, he didn't want to cook any more, he was finished with that," says Panozzo, with a proud smile. "I don't think they could believe it, but that was how it was. Now he's into being an ordinary kid - you should have seen him in his cricket whites the other day. That was his choice too - he wants to play cricket!"
Ordinariness - quietly fitting in - is a strong part of the immigrant experience, particularly when the impetus for immigration is trauma. While the Jewish experience of the Holocaust is well known, there are other effects of that war too, as Panozzo explains.
"My father was a partisan fighting in the north," she says. "He was a trade unionist, so he was anti-Mussolini - antifascist. So the war wasn't just about the Nazis in Italy, there was the civil war that followed. Mussolini was responsible for more Italian deaths than the actual war itself. There is hardly a village or community that wasn't affected by killings."
So, although invisible, the trauma of persecution that affected so many immigrant communities is very close to the surface of ostensibly sunny Australia, Panozzo says.
"I think that's why there is such an emphasis on a sense of humour in Australia," she says. "Well, that's my opinion, I may be wrong. But I see that now in the Jewish humour too. I understand better where it comes from. I went to see Billy Crystal and he's talking about all this painful stuff and the whole theatre is laughing. That's what this play does too. I bought a Jewish joke book - Oy Vey! and it's all about tragedy and misfortune - and you laugh. This is what Bessie - my grandmother - is all about: the big brass band and the humour." She laughs.
From Door to Door, Seymour Theatre Centre; 28 February 28- March 24; ph: 9351 7940 or seymourbox@seymour.usyd.edu.au
Useful and interesting links: http://www.sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au
http://www.accau.org/(group that assists families with adoption and international aid projects).
http://www.winsomebooks.com.au/Pages/Fertility.htm (link to Always a part of me - Surviving Childbearing Loss).
http://esvc000989.wic022u.server-web.com/scripts/shop_item.asp?by=cat&item=1900 (link to Jesse's World - A story of adoption and the global family)
http://www.nickjr.com.au/site/cookingWithLuis.asp (Luis' cooking show website with the episodes)
