Author and playwright Anton Piatigorsky isn’t intimidated by the fact The Dybbuk, an early 20th century play often considered a centerpiece of Yiddish literature has been adapted numerous times in past.
“I try to look honestly at the material and be very thorough in my research about it and then respond honestly to it,” the Washington, D.C.-born writer of fiction, plays and opera librettos, who’s been living in Canada for the past 20 years or so, said. His version of The Dybbuk, Or Between Two Worlds, which he’s adapted for the Soulpepper Theatre Company, is running until June 27.
“I try not to worry about whether it’s been done before or if I’m doing something unorthodox. I feel like if the work is honest, something good will come of it.”
Piatigorsky, whose paternal grandfather was Russian and whose maternal grandparents came from the Pale of Settlement, said he didn’t grow up with Yiddish in the house but became fascinated as a young adult, by Jewish mysticism.
“I’ve long been interested in The Dybbuk because it’s so thorough in its use of the Kabbalah, and so mixed with folk traditions from 19th century Poland. It’s a very dense text, and I’ve always really liked texts that you really have to think about and unpack,” he said.
The Dybbuk was originally written in Russian by the Russian Jewish author, playwright and researcher of Jewish folklore, S. Ansky, between 1913 and 1916.
Ansky subsequently translated it into Yiddish, the language in which the play had its 1920 world premiere.
The play tells the story of a young woman possessed by the wicked spirit – known in Jewish folklore as “the Dybbuk” – of her dead lover.
It has been translated extensively and performed internationally.
Piatigorsky has studied Jewish mysticism both formally at university as well as on his own, and said that a number of his early plays, written while in his 20s, weaved aspects of Jewish mysticism into non-religious contexts.
He was approached by Soulpepper to write an adaptation of The Dybbuk and completed a preliminary version of the play in 2008.
Soulpepper’s initial idea was to approach the play from a multi-disciplinary perspective and to involve a dance company and musician, but Piatigorsky said workshopping of this concept led the company to opt for a more traditional rendering of the story.
So Piatigorsky revisited it, and referred to the final adaptation he produced as fairly conservative and “not a radical rewrite,” despite some rewriting of dialogue and text and restructuring of some of the scenes.
What’s unique about his take, he said, is that he tried to portray the world The Dybbuk inhabits with some distance.
In the first years after The Dybbuk was produced, he said, it was often regarded as a portrait of the somewhat familiar world of one’s parents or ancestors.
Later, in the post-Holocaust period, it was seen as representing a lost world destroyed by tragedy.
Piatigorsky wished to depart from these treatments and take it as a society on its own terms, albeit one traumatized by years of anti-Semitism, pogroms and isolation, without ominously “trying to project onto the community what is going to happen to it.”
He was also interested in exploring the ways notions of gender play out in the story.
“What happened with the Dybbuk is a real shock in terms of gender boundaries. I was interested in what this meant for this community and how they’d respond to and interact with this hybrid, dual male and female creature that comes from the possession, and what it means,” Piatigorsky said.
He also tried to make the language somewhat more contemporary, replacing some of the Yiddish words and phrases with English ones, without omitting references to Kabbalah and Jewish folklore.
“I wanted to invite people in by making them comfortable with the language but still emphasizing the ways this is a distinct community.”
Piatigorsky stressed that there are elements of the play that are universal and accessible to audiences of different backgrounds, such as the central love story and the suspense of the ghost story, but that “the more details you know about Judaism, the more you’ll get out of it.”
The Dybbuk, Or Between Two Worlds, runs at the Soulpepper Theatre in Toronto’s Distillery District until June 27. Tickets can be purchased at Soulpepper.ca or by calling 416-866-8666
