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by S. Ansky, adapted by Anton Piatigorsky, directed by Albert Schultz

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

May 21-June 27, 2015

Channon: “We need not wage war against sin, we need only purify it”

Soulpepper has a hit with The Dybbuk, its first ever foray into Yiddish drama.  The Dybbuk, first performed in Warsaw in 1920, is a dark tale of possession and exorcism in a small Jewish community in Ukraine in the 19th century.  Powerful performances from its leads and highly imaginative direction from Albert Schultz make the production as exciting as the story.

S. Ansky was the pen-name of Shloyme Zanvi Rappopport (1863-1920), a Russian Jewish ethnographer and writer.  Realizing that the tradition of oral folklore was dying out in Russia, he set about collecting stories from isolated Jewish communities where the tradition still existed.  Some of these tales inspired Ansky to write The Dybbuk, first in Russian and then translated by him into Yiddish.  The play is now considered the cornerstone of Yiddish drama. 

In Jewish folklore a “dybbuk” is the soul of a dead person who invades the body of living person to accomplish some goal.  Usually, the dybbuk chooses his target at random, but Ansky significantly alters this aspect for his play.  The play is set in Brinitz, a Jewish shtetl somewhere near Miropol in Ukraine.  In Anton Piatigorsky’s adaptation, the action begins with a prologue set at a shabbat dinner at the home of the wealthy merchant Sender (Alex Poch-Goldin).  A friend Asher (Jordan Pettle) is upset because of signs he has seen that he thinks point to coming misfortune, such as the advent of another pogrom.  One of these signs is the appearance of a stranger in town known only as the Messenger (Diego Matamoros).  At the dinner Schultz shows us silently how the yeshiva student Channon (Colin Palangio), newly returned to town, and Sender’s daughter Leah (Hailey Gillis) are immediately attracted to each other. 

In the next scene students talk about powers that famous tzadikim (or righteous men) have gained from their mastery of the Kabbalah, an occult tradition within Judaism that can involve assigning numbers to Hebrew letters and combining the letters to form significant numbers.  We find that this aspect of the Kabbalah is exactly what Channon has been studying during his year away from Brinitz.  The students also discuss the reputation Sender is gaining for rejecting every suitor who seeks Leah’s hand.  This secretly cheers Channon because he has studied the Kabbalah expressly to win Leah as his wife since Sender will not even consider him as a suitor because he has no wealth.  When news comes that Sender has actually accepted the latest suitor Menashe (Richard Lam) as Leah’s future husband, Channon is distraught.  Following a tale told by the Messenger of how to gain supreme power, Channon utters the unutterable name of God and falls dead.

Later when Leah’s wedding day arrives, she visits the cemetery to invite dead family members to her wedding.  She breaks with tradition, however, by insisting on inviting Channon, who is not family, to her wedding.  Then during the wedding ceremony, when Leah and her bridegroom are already under the wedding canopy, she pushes Menashe away and begins speaking in a male voice.  Everyone realizes she has become possessed by a dybbuk.  Schultz’s staging reveals that the dybbuk is Channon.

The second half of the play is concerned not only with the exorcism of the dybbuk but the mystery of why Leah should have been chosen by the dybbuk.  Sender has sought the help of the great tzadik Azriel of Miropol (William Webster), but Azriel says that a dybbuk chooses a woman usually as punishment on a family for some crime.  Before any exorcism can begin Azriel has to solve the mystery that led to it.

Albert Schultz pushes the minimalist directorial techniques he experimented with in Of Human Bondage last year even farther in The Dybbuk.  The stage at the Baillie Theatre is bare all the way to the back brick wall except for a few chairs piled nearby.  Sender’s house is indicated by four sheer black curtains with entry through any of the four open corners.  The front curtain rises to turn the house into the synagogue.  In Act 2 Rabbi Azriel’s house in indicated by only a surrounding outline of light.  The plank benches used in the synagogue scene are simply turned over, their two slab-like supports becoming headstones for the graveyard scene.  

Schultz uses his theatrical imagination rather than technological innovation for the show’s many special effects.  When the possessed Leah rebels, she has the effect of making chairs tumble, trays shoot off the table and the table itself shake and rise.  All these effects are accomplished by human means and through the clever use of misdirection, just as a magician uses in doing magic – and the effects are just as magical.  The sudden appearance of Nisan, Channon’s dead father, and the disappearance of the dybbuk after the exorcism are accomplished with the simplest of means but are beautifully executed.  When the possessed Leah speaks or when Channon’s father speaks through the Messenger, Schultz does not use voice-altering microphones.  Instead, he simply has Leah and Channon or Nisan and the Messenger speak at once to create the eerie and appropriate sound of two beings speaking as one.  

Bonnie Beecher has plunged the haze-filled stage into general dimness.  Frequently figures at the front of the stage appear in silhouette.  Low placed lamps cause actors to cast giant shadows.  Her use of light and shadow to depict the supernatural climax of the show is absolutely brillian.  The large cast is uneven, but the actors in principal roles are all strong.  Colin Palangio, in his first lead role at Soulpepper, gives a powerful performance as Channon, moving from from enthusiasm and joy as the Kabbalah student who thinks he has found the key to happiness to rage and pain as the dybbuk.  Hailey Gillis, also in her first lead role for the company, makes Leah a strong female figure, ready early on to defy convention.  Both are fine physical actors – Palangio as the dybbuk writhing and thrashing during the rabbi’s exorcism, Gillis acquiring a new strength, stature and gait when possessed.

The Sender of Alex Poch-Goldin may be too wholesome when first meet him showing nothing to suggests he looks down on the poor.  But when confronted with the past, Poch-Goldin’s Sender expresses such guilt and humiliation it is almost painful to watch.  William Webster’s Rabbi Azriel is a complex figure.  He’s a man at the end of his career who doesn’t think he has the strength to take on so challenging a task as an exorcism, but, once he discovers the reason for Leah’s possession is galvanized to pursue his task to the end.

Especially noteworthy is Diego Matamoros as the enigmatic Messenger.  It may help to know that the word for angel both in Hebrew as in Greek (ἄγγελος, whence our word “angel”) means “messenger”.  Ansky’s Messenger knows more about the past that anyone in Brinitz and can foretell the future.  He presides over the action and puts in Channon’s mind the act that causes his death.  Rather than having the ghost of Channon’s father speak directly to Azriel, Piatigorsky has the good idea of having him communicate via the Messenger, thus setting up a parallel between Channon as a dybbuk and his father as a ghost.  Matamoros retains a wry tone of voice and eerie calm as if everything is already known to the Messenger, who may have entered the human realm to right a wrong.      

The Soulpepper production works well as a gripping ghost story and as an intriguing window into another time, place and culture.  What does not come through as well is the revolutionary nature of Ansky’s play.  In Piatigorsky’s adaptation, it does not come through until the end that the reason why Leah’s and Channon’s love is unfulfilled is because she is rich and he is not.  Piatigorsky’s prologue shows the two at the same table to have them meet, but it could also have shown Sender’s displeasure at their attraction and have him or someone else explain why.  This would give the Messenger’s speech about rich and poor more pointed when it occurs in the following scene.

The play’s deeper meaning concerns religious belief.  While all the minor characters believe in an absolute separation of good and evil, Channon does not.  He says, “We need not wage war against sin, we need only purify it….  so must we cleanse sin of its dross until nothing but holiness remains”.  Shocking the other yeshiva students, Channon insists that even Satan is not wholly evil: “Satan is the opposite of God, and as one of His aspects, he contains a holy spark”.  Everyone who knows him thinks Channon’s pursuit of occult knowledge through the Kabbalah is wrong, but the action of the play does not support this view.  At first, we think that Channon pursues Leah as an evil spirit, but as the play progresses we find that is not true.  In fact, the ending suggests that the play upholds Channon’s view and that sin, in this case an unmarried male and female living as one, has truly been purified.  While Piatigorsky wants the conclusion to be a surprise, it would only gain in strength if we saw more clearly how the imagery of the play points to this ending as inevitable.

Toronto has not seen a profession production of this great play since John Hirsch’s renowned production presented by Toronto Arts Productions in 1974.  Since this new production of The Dybbuk will close soon, we will have to hope that Soulpepper brings it back for another season so that more people can enjoy its thrills and theatricality.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Hailey Gillis and Colin Palangio; William Webster, Hailey Gillis, Alex Poch-Goldin and Leah Cherniak; Ron Pederson, Paolo Santalucia, Diego Matamoros and Richard Lam. ©2015 Cylla von Tiedemann.  

For tickets, visit www.soulpepper.ca.