The early 20th-century Yiddish playwright S. Ansky is turning Japanese - the result of a collaboration between a Japanese theater professor in California and one in Israel.
"The Dybbuk / Between Two Worlds," was presented at a December 8 symposium on Israeli theater at the University of California.
"Whenever I would tell people the story of "The Dybbuk," they said it sounded like a Noh play," says UCLA professor Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, referring to the classical Japanese theater style. The same thing happened to her longtime friend and fellow expert on Japanese theater, Tel Aviv University Prof. Zvika Serper. So when they ran into each other at a Munich conference five years ago and Serper said he'd always wanted to adapt "The Dybbuk" in Japanese style, Sorgenfrei said, "Me too!"
A mainstay of early Jewish theater, Ansky's original Yiddish text, written in 1914, was lost during the Russian pogroms and had to be later reconstructed from poet and linguist Haim Nahman Bialik's Hebrew translation. Based on Eastern European Hasidic Jewish folklore, "The Dybbuk" tells of a young woman, Lea, who is possessed by the ghost of her dead love, Hanan, on the very day that she is set to marry another man, whom her father has chosen. A powerful rabbi is summoned to perform an exorcism, during which it is discovered that Lea's and Hanan's fathers were once good friends who had pledged that their children would marry each other. Though circumstance separated the fathers, destiny united the lovers, and in the end Lea chooses to join Hanan in the world of the dead rather than remain without him in the world of the living.
"Noh theater is based on the mystical connections between this world and the other world," says Sorgenfrei.
"The majority of the plays deal with characters who are dead and unable to find peace and move on to the next Buddhist reincarnation. They return to the site of their most intense passion in life - their greatest joy, greatest sorrow, greatest anger or victory - they can't let go of this extreme human emotion." The parallels with dybbuks - which Sorgenfrei describes as "the spirit of a dead person that is unable to find rest in the dead world and enters the body of the living" - were too powerful to ignore.
To update "The Dybbuk," its two adapters stripped away stories of famous rabbis who performed various miracles, and focused instead on the central love story, which was similar to traditional Japanese ghost tales. They incorporated Bialik's poetry and turned some of the text to song. "The vocalization has a sung or chanted quality, and the writing style is intentionally poetic," Sorgenfrei says. Ofer Ben-Amots of Tel Aviv University, where the adaptation premiered in June, composed hypnotic music for the piece, combining Japanese drums and flutes with traditional Jewish musical styles.
Instead of a straight play, the new version was conceived as an avant-garde theater piece. "There is an emphasis on the audience using their imagination. For example, there are dances with ropes, where the rope turns into a tallis, much like the Japanese use fans in dances," Sorgenfrei says. "There is a sense of two worlds colliding - the worlds of living and dead, of past and present, and also between the world of Jewish thought and Japanese thought."
