325 E. 6th Street
New York, NY 10003
917 670-1631
Downtown's Upstart Yiddish Theater
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325 E. 6th Street New York, NY 10003 917 670-1631 Downtown's Upstart Yiddish Theater |
| Here’s something you probably haven’t heard before. Hundreds of thousands of people who don’t speak French go to see movies in French. Why? Because the movies themselves interest them. The same thing happens with movies in Japanese or Spanish or Arabic. And with operas in Italian or German. And with plays too, like Peter Brook’s French-language Tierno Bokar or Kaos at New York Theater Workshop. Well, why not theater in Yiddish? After all, back in the day, lots of people who couldn’t speak Yiddish used to go to Yiddish theater -- because they knew they would see something exciting. (For Moscow’s legendary GOSET theater, the non-Yiddish-speakers were a majority of the audience!) And they didn’t have the supertitle translations that we use today. Yiddish theater back then was the cutting edge. More great directors, great designers, and great actors came from Yiddish theater than you can possibly imagine: Boris Aronson, Joseph Schildkraut, Stella Adler, Paul Muni, Sam Leve, the list goes on and on. Its influence on other theater, especially in America, has been gigantic. And like the late Joseph Papp said, Yiddish is the perfect language for theater; its expressiveness is theatrical. There is something about the sound of Yiddish... it’s the perfect music to accompany a Jewish story. The New Yiddish Rep believes that it is still possible to reinvigorate Yiddish theater, provided we do it now. But it must be exciting theater. The days when Yiddish theater could depend on audiences coming for the language itself are over. Nowadays the theater that we present must be the selling point, not the language that we present it in. We must present Theater That Happens To Be In Yiddish, not Yiddish That Happens To Be Onstage. And nostalgia as a selling point is a dead end. If you believe your natural audience is the elderly, if all you want your theater to be is Inoffensive, then you will never attract the young. Without the young the story is over. We must challenge and excite them if we are to get them to come. The shows we present must be Stimulating. Witty. Daring. Theatrical. Newsworthy. The New Yiddish Rep is a small but dedicated group of theater professionals, all fluent in Yiddish and with extensive credits in Yiddish theater. We also have backgrounds in experimental theater, magic, comedy, and music. We’ve acted and directed on Broadway and in Paris, in Romania and Israel, all over the U.S. and Canada and Germany and Spain, in English and Russian and Danish and Romanian and lots and lots of times in Yiddish. So far we have presented a handful of very small shows and the response has been very encouraging. “The Essence: A Yiddish Theater Dim Sum”, our ‘jaunt through the history of Yiddish theater’, has gone over beautifully. Audiences have been tremendously moved by “Yosl Rakover Speaks To G-d”, which is about the last hours of a resistance fighter in the Warsaw ghetto. And “Vaudeville Plus Yiddish Divided By Shane Baker” has gotten tremendous response. We have much more challenging plans in the works, including plays by Elie Wiesel and Boris Thomashefsky, and experiments with theater styles that have never been done in Yiddish. (We’ve already done this in a small way -- “Yosl Rakover...” is the first-ever one-man drama in Yiddish.) We even plan to do real repertory (i.e., have several shows running at once, different ones on different nights), which hasn’t been done in New York in any language in decades. As Joseph Buloff said, Yiddish theater survives on miracles -- work with us to make a miracle happen. Donate what you can. But more importantly, come see one of our shows. You’ll love it. Don’t support us because you feel you have a responsibility to. Do it because you want to. And if you don’t like what you see, don’t support us. Thanks. |
