Yiddish classic brings director back to old haunt
Bryna Wasserman returns to Montreal with the spiritual play The Dybbuk
To borrow the subtitle of the play she’s about to bring to the Segal, director Bryna Wasserman really is between two worlds these days.
Though mostly based in New York, where she’s been running the century- old National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene since 2011, she still maintains strong links with the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre — the legendary company she took over from her late mother in 1996 — here in Montreal. Having recently codirected The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds with Rachelle Glait for New York’s Kulturfest, she’s now bringing the Yiddish- speak- ing ( though surtitled) production, complete with an 18- strong cast and a soundtrack from Josh ( Socalled) Dolgin, to the place she still instinctively calls home.
S. Ansky’s play put Yiddish theatre on the map in 1920, and also popularized the legend of the dybbuk, a wandering soul who seeks to transcend death by inhabiting the body of a living host. Its story of supernatural possession and the attempts of a wise old holy man to drive it back from whence it came might seem like the blueprint to a thousand Hollywood schlockers. But Wasserman, in a phone conversation from New York, insists that “it’s not The Exorcist and it’s not a horror play. It’s closer, if I think about it, to the Darren Aronofsky film, Pi.”
In that film, a disturbed young man becomes obsessed with using the Kabbalah, the ancient Jewish system of esoteric knowledge, to unlock the secrets of the universe.
The Dybbuk also revolves around a young man’s dabbling with the Kabbalah, but in his case, it’s to get the girl he was destined to marry before cruel fate — and parental materialism — intervened. “It’s really a passionate story,” Wasserman says.
“The ultimate love story, in fact. At the same time, it examines the spirituality of life, with Leah, the heroine, asking what happens to the souls that have not fulfilled their life on this Earth. Those are beautiful passages and those of us who have ever experienced any kind of loss can relate to them. I think that’s the beauty of the play.”
Set in the shtetls of 19thcentury Ukraine, The Dybbuk is steeped in Jewish folklore and religious ritual in a way that’s both heady and claustrophobic ( the play was put “on trial” in 1926 in Tel Aviv for allegedly holding back Jewish culture; it was finally cleared). For Wasserman, the play’s beautiful yet potentially stifling evocation of an intensely traditional community is tempered by a sense of rebellion, with the initially obedient Leah finding liberation in possession.
“There’s a wonderful line in the play, where she says something like ‘ The Dybbuk is speaking now, and as long as I have a bit of strength, I will struggle and never leave.’ And that was a message to the revolutionary period of Russia. It spoke to the people.”
DYB BUKSON STAGE AND SCREEN
Though long a part of Jewish folklore, it wasn’t until S. Ansky’s 1920 play that dybbuks began to haunt the mainstream imagination. Written as a result of Ansky’s government- sponsored anthropological wanderings throughout the shtetls of Ukraine, The Dybbuk was to have been premièred by Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre.
However, a series of unfortunate events put paid to that. Stanislavsky fell ill with typhus and the main actor succumbed to a nervous breakdown. Was this a case of a demonic curse, the kind that is said to have befallen the set of The Exorcist? Not really. Typhus had been reaching epidemic proportions in postrevolutionary Russia.
As for the actor, Michael Chekhov ( nephew of the great playwright), his going off the rails was a result of his pushing his performance to extremes in an attempt to capture the intensity required for the exorcism scenes.
Ansky never got to see his play performed. It premièred soon after his death in 1920 in a production by the Vilna Troupe, the world- renowned Yiddish theatre company from Lithuania. Since then, it has received numerous productions around the world, including at the Royal Shakespeare Company and as an opera by Ofer Ben- Amots at the Segal in 2008. Last May, the Torontobased Soulpepper presented the play to considerable acclaim ( the director, Albert Schultz, cheekily promoting it as “Romeo and Juliet meets The Exorcist, on the set of Fiddler on the Roof ”).
Given The Dybbuk’s evocative portrait of a Jewish milieu that was soon to be so agonizingly ripped out of Europe, it’s inevitable that some playwrights have made darkly imaginative leaps between the world of the play and The Holocaust. Tony Kushner’s A Dybbuk ( 1997), though a more or less faithful adaptation of the play, alludes to the future mountains of dead, while Julia Pascal’s 1992 adaptation goes much further by having the events of the play enacted by several deportees destined for Auschwitz.
If that sounds controversial, even problematic, it took Hollywood, and the producing skills of Michael Bay ( director of the Transformers movies), to really soar over the dividing line between good and appalling taste with The Unborn ( 2009), in which the dybbuk is the result of Dr. Mengele’s genetic experiments. Hardly discouraged by The Unborn’s universal drubbing, Hollywood had another feeble crack at the legend with 2012’ s The Possession in which a young girl unwisely opens a “dybbuk box” and, for some reason, spends the rest of the film regurgitating moths.
Although The Dybbuk was respectably adapted as a Polish film in 1937, perhaps the definitive screen treatment of the legend is to be found in the opening few minutes of the Coen Brother’s A Serious Man ( 2009). Despite the brevity of the scene ( and its apparent disconnectedness to the rest of the film), its loving evocation of shtetl manners and mores perfectly captures the mood of Ansky’s play while gently sending it up.