The Dybbuk
May. 2nd, 2003 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidThere is a classic Yiddish movie The Dybbuk, the story of an engaged woman whose fiance dies and his soul takes up residence in her body. I've never seen it.
The play I saw last night (by Julia Pascal, at the Loeb Ex) takes that story, and sets it in a different frame, where five Jews are waiting to be shipped out by the Nazis, and in the meantime, to distract themselves, end up acting out this story from the shtetl. Over the course of the play, the characters in the ghetto flow in and out of acting their other characters, in between discussions about their situation, and moments of terror when there are roundups, and by the end, the parallel between the situations is clear, the engaged woman keeping her fiance inside her, and the one survivor of her ghetto, with all those dead she must remember.
This was the first play I've been to where those in the front row (on all three sides) were cautioned that they must not get up during the course of the play. That gave me more of a hint about the complexity of the set.
Around three sides on the floor there were squares of metal mesh, that made sounds when walked on. In the middle, there was a large square of clear floor. There were vertical frames on three sides, each with randomly criss-crossing wires. There were cords leading to the frames, along the ground, and over the course of the play, they were raised and (inch by inch) lowered, as the characters were in the ghetto, then took themselves out through their acting, then their reality intruded again. The lighting also showed the differences, with plain light in the ghetto, a warmer, slightly reddish light for the inside story, and bright stark lights during the roundups (when there were also very loud sirens; I had to plug my ears). The first one made me jump, I was so startled.
It was a stark set, and the only other stuff they had were five battered suitcases, and the few things they had inside them. The suitcases were a way to keep their things with them (few items without a particular memory to hold on to, of those already lost), but were also chairs, delineators of walkways, and used in the inner play by the ghetto characters as signs, as they wrote on the side in chalk.
The actors did a good job. There were a few times that words were not pronounced as they should've been (it took me far too long to recognize "Baal Shem Tov"), stressing the wrong syllables and such, but those were pretty small compared to the rest of the show, which included some singing in Hebrew, and at one point the central character speaking in English, while two others quietly spoke the same words, slightly delayed, in two other languages (Yiddish and French, from the few bits that I heard, but it was hard to focus on the side pieces, especially since there was also music playing).
Although the point was clear, the ending was not quite satisfying, with many minutes of actors moving through particular motions, but no dialogue. Still, it was an interesting show, very intense.
I ran into Jerry Z at the theater, so we sat together. He's seen the movie many times, and I think the play was a bit harder for him, since he had more knowledge of the original than I do.
The play I saw last night (by Julia Pascal, at the Loeb Ex) takes that story, and sets it in a different frame, where five Jews are waiting to be shipped out by the Nazis, and in the meantime, to distract themselves, end up acting out this story from the shtetl. Over the course of the play, the characters in the ghetto flow in and out of acting their other characters, in between discussions about their situation, and moments of terror when there are roundups, and by the end, the parallel between the situations is clear, the engaged woman keeping her fiance inside her, and the one survivor of her ghetto, with all those dead she must remember.
This was the first play I've been to where those in the front row (on all three sides) were cautioned that they must not get up during the course of the play. That gave me more of a hint about the complexity of the set.
Around three sides on the floor there were squares of metal mesh, that made sounds when walked on. In the middle, there was a large square of clear floor. There were vertical frames on three sides, each with randomly criss-crossing wires. There were cords leading to the frames, along the ground, and over the course of the play, they were raised and (inch by inch) lowered, as the characters were in the ghetto, then took themselves out through their acting, then their reality intruded again. The lighting also showed the differences, with plain light in the ghetto, a warmer, slightly reddish light for the inside story, and bright stark lights during the roundups (when there were also very loud sirens; I had to plug my ears). The first one made me jump, I was so startled.
It was a stark set, and the only other stuff they had were five battered suitcases, and the few things they had inside them. The suitcases were a way to keep their things with them (few items without a particular memory to hold on to, of those already lost), but were also chairs, delineators of walkways, and used in the inner play by the ghetto characters as signs, as they wrote on the side in chalk.
The actors did a good job. There were a few times that words were not pronounced as they should've been (it took me far too long to recognize "Baal Shem Tov"), stressing the wrong syllables and such, but those were pretty small compared to the rest of the show, which included some singing in Hebrew, and at one point the central character speaking in English, while two others quietly spoke the same words, slightly delayed, in two other languages (Yiddish and French, from the few bits that I heard, but it was hard to focus on the side pieces, especially since there was also music playing).
Although the point was clear, the ending was not quite satisfying, with many minutes of actors moving through particular motions, but no dialogue. Still, it was an interesting show, very intense.
I ran into Jerry Z at the theater, so we sat together. He's seen the movie many times, and I think the play was a bit harder for him, since he had more knowledge of the original than I do.