A poor scholar and the daughter of a wealthy man fall in love. But she is betrothed against her will to another, and the scholar dies in anguish. Then, on her wedding day, he returns in the form of a dybbuk- a discontented spirit of the dead that resides in the body of a living human being to possess her. Secrets of the past are revealed: The fathers of the ill-fated lovers were friends, and had promised their children to one another in marriage a promise tragically forgotten. The scholar’s aggrieved father, long dead, brings the wealthy man to trial from beyond the grave. An attempt is made to exorcise the dybbuk, but the bride merges her soul to his in a living death and, like an otherworldly Juliet, joins her predestined bridegroom.
This is but one of many possible readings of S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, a play that has sustained a ubiquitous appeal since it was first produced, in its original Yiddish, in 1914. From its most famous production, the play’s Hebrew-language debut at Moscow’s Habimah Theatre in 1922 (with Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Gorky and Chagall in the audience) through a variety of modern renderings (including Andrzej Wajda’s staging of a Polish translation at Pepsico’s Summerfare Festival in 1989, and a two-actor version, translated and adapted by British actor Bruce Myers, which toured widely throughout the U.S.), The Dybbuk has offered audiences a distinctive blend of romance, mysticism and morality.
A new version of the play (cast more traditionally, with 23 actors playing 50 roles) runs through Feb. 6 at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, adapted and directed by the Public’s artistic director, Edward Gilbert, as the centerpiece of his debut season. Gilbert’s association with the play goes back 20 years, when, as artistic director of the Manitoba Theatre Center in Canada, he commissioned an adaptation from the theatre’s founder, John Hirsch. Hirsch–a Hungarian-born Jew and Holocaust survivor for whom the play’s original title, Between Two Worlds, might have had special resonance directed his own translation at Manitoba in 1974 and again the following year at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.
A pledge not carried out
Although Gilbert incorporates ideas from Hirsch’s adaptation in his own, his version hews more closely to Ansky’s original Yiddish text. The focus is on the father’s trial rather than the bride’s exorcism; what results is a surprisingly modern reading of the play, at least for one accustomed to productions that emphasize its dark undercurrent of spirituality and folklore.
“Ansky’s original carefully threads a development of plot and structures a legal argument with great precision,” Gilbert explains. “These were elements of the play that I think had taken a secondary place in John’s version, and I wanted to return to an enquiry that focused more closely on those aspects.
“The second half of the play becomes an enquiry into the nature of human responsibility when Sender, the father”–played in Pittsburgh by veteran actor Jack Davidson “is brought to a trial on the basis of a pledge he had made and then not carried out. Although in a legal sense Sender had no obligation, he may still have had a moral or ethical obligation; the fact that you do not have a legal obligation does not let you off the hook. Your responsibility to other human beings goes beyond what the law sets down.”
What country is this?
Designing both the sets and costumes for The Dybbuk is British designer Mark Negin, who designed the costumes for Hirsch’s Manitoba production 20 years ago. (In a bit of casting sure to provoke sentimental approbation, the Pittsburgh production also features George Sperdakos as the Messenger, the same part he played in Hirsch’s Los Angeles staging.) With Negin, Gilbert has sought to evoke the atmosphere of the most famous Jewish play ever written without overburdening the telling of the story with its historical background.
“The Dybbuk is a play like any other play,” Gilbert insists. “Not to de-emphasize its particulars, but there have been cases of possession in other cultures at other times. This has been a dramatically charged event in the life of a number of communities when they face a disturbance that they don’t quite know how to deal with, a disturbance of the human psyche and the human spirit.
“We’re even now discussing how much you have to put in the program,” he goes on. “The play takes you back to a very particular time and place that you can’t even find on the map anymore. But I don’t think you have to be able to find it or know where it is. It’s like Shakespeare in Twelfth Night: ‘What country, friend, is this?’ and the answer is ‘This is Illyria, lady.’ You don’t have to know where Illyria is; it’s a place of the imagination.”
