Traveling Jewis Theatre presents Dybbuk

April 21 - May 30, 2004:

DYBBUK reviews

east bay express

"Dybbuk is a hair-raising ghost story, a love story, and a religious parable all in one, brilliantly embodied by two actors in multiple roles. Framed as a story told by a loving and frisky couple over a Sabbath dinner, the whole production has a sense of ritual about it, from the reverently rendered songs to the candles that remain lit throughout the play. Director Fischer's simple staging brings out the play's nature as a much-loved tale that retains its freshness no matter how many times it is told -- or how many times it is seen, for that matter. "

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sf bay guardian
" Among the wandering spirits of the unhappy dead, Jewish folklore calls the one who possesses the body of a living person a dybbuk. Traveling Jewish Theater closes its 25th-anniversary season with a captivating revival of Bruce Myers's 1977 adaptation of the internationally prized ghost story by S. Ansky. A young wife (Karine Koret), beginning what becomes a deceptively straightforward layering of tales, tries to assuage the existential qualms of her husband (Keith Davis) by telling him the story of a religious scholar who challenges all orthodoxy with dreams of ultimate knowledge and power. By turns romantic, funny, wise, creepy, and haunting, the play makes use of an exquisitely distilled theatrical lexicon (set off gloriously in David Robertson's stark lighting design), wherein the actors' nimble transformations into a succession of characters subtly overlaps with the transfiguration and immateriality of the theme. In the sure hands of director and TJT cofounder Corey Fischer – veteran of the play's New York City premiere as well as two previous TJT productions – Dybbuk's marvelously pure theatricality, its synthesis of modern and traditional forms, marks the company's milestone with a fitting illumination of the very nature and import of storytelling." (Avila)

oakland tribune
"Although nothing is fancy in this "Dybbuk," all the elements come together beautifully, beginning with Karine Koret and Keith Davis, two grounded and intensely focused actors playing multiple roles under the direction of TJT co-founder Corey Fischer. "
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J weekly

Chanon and Leah are Keith C. Davis and Karine Koret. They are not oonly a fine pair of lovers but also do double- and triple duty in other roles. Davis is particularly funny and effective as Leah’s self-righteous, self-serving father and her kvetchy bubbe. He also takes on the part of the exorcising rabbi — mostly in Yiddish. Koret also plays a student-friend of the scholar Chanon, who comes to urge him to give up his hopeless passion and live in the real world, but she saves her real power for the closing exorcism scene in which she truly is something to behold.

With some kind of directorial sleight-of-hand Fischer takes these two people and a scant 90 minutes of dialogue and turns it into an evening of high drama. “Dybbuk” is totally absorbing from beginning to end.

Slideshows of Dybbuk 2004:
PDF [go] Windows Media Player [go]