Igor Golyak reimagines ‘The Dybbuk’ for the 21st Century

“When it was created it was very much like any play by Chekhov or Shakespeare,” Golyak told me over the phone two days after opening night. “It made a revolution of some sort and [it’s about] how you translate the essence of that revolution to today’s world.”

Yet, when you walk into the second-floor performance space, it’s like a time warp. You’re immersed in this old world, a shtetl perhaps, one populated by long ago and faraway characters who are very much present in the here and now. And, at times, literally in your face. 

Golyak, who The New York Times recently called “among the most inventive directors working in the United States,” first encountered The Dybbuk when he was studying at the Schukin Theatre Institute in Moscow. But the idea for this version, which he co-adapted with Dr. Rachel Merrill Moss, came to him about a year and half ago when he visited the Vilna Shul, which was built as an Orthodox synagogue in 1919 primarily by Lithuania immigrants. It was repurposed as Boston’s Center for Jewish Culture in the 1980s.

Read more at https://forward.com/culture/theater/620641/dybbuk-ansky-arlekin-golyak-boston-vilna-shul/