Debra Caplan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, where she is completing a dissertation on the interwar Yiddish art theater movement. Her work has appeared in Comparative Drama, New England Theatre Journal, The Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy and is forthcoming in Yiddish Women Writers and The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy. At Harvard, Debra is also Executive Director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research and is the former artistic director of the Harvard Yiddish Players, where she directed Di gantse velt iz a teater and Shulamis (produced in cooperation with the Folksbiene).
TMT: You’re The (*) Inn dramaturg and resident expert in all things Yiddish, both culturally and linguistically. Tell us a little about yourself? How did you first become interested in Yiddish culture? And how is it we at Target Margin had the pleasure of working with you? Don’t tell anyone we had to bribe you.
DC: It’s hard to say when I first became interested in Yiddish because I grew up surrounded by it. My father spoke Yiddish fluently and had a passion for all things Yiddish. In the 70s my dad had tried to create a Yiddish film restoration and distribution company but he couldn’t drum up enough interest and the venture went bankrupt. Instead, he found work as a floor covering salesman and became known as the only person who could still sell you a floor in Yiddish in Philadelphia. I grew up in a house full of Yiddish books, Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish radio, and Yiddish songs – in fact, one of my earliest childhood memories is my father singing “Ikh hob dikh tsifil lib” (a Yiddish theater classic) to my sister and I as a bedtime song.
Years later, after my father had passed away from cancer, I went to Hampshire College, the only college in the country that has a Yiddish cultural center right on campus. Believe it or not, this was a total accident. But when I got to campus and needed a work-study job, working at the National Yiddish Book Center sounded much more appealing than working in the cafeteria or the student union, so I got a job there. I probably ended up spending more time at the Yiddish Book Center than I did in the classroom, and the education I received there changed my life. Yiddish and Yiddish culture became my obsession, and I spent the next several years traveling to intensive language programs in Lithuania, California, Russia, and Israel to improve my Yiddish. Discovering Yiddish theater sealed the deal. I had always acted and directed as a hobby, but finding such a rich treasure trove of amazing material that was virtually unexplored proved irresistible. I majored in Yiddish theater in college, and then enrolled in a Yiddish PhD program at Harvard, where I’m currently completing a dissertation on interwar Yiddish art theater. So there you have it.
And as for Target Margin, you couldn’t bribe me if you tried. How could I stay away? The pleasure is all mine.
TMT: Even though this is an English translation, there’s still a fair bit of the Yiddish language throughout the play. What are some essential Yiddish phrases we should know? What are some essential Yiddish phrases we should know that our mother’s wouldn’t want us to?
DC: Oh, this’ll be fun. Here are a few of my favorites, and a few insults to boot (Yiddish insults make the best zingers):
Nayn rabonim kenen keyn minyen nit makhn, ober tsen shuster yo – Nine Rabbis can’t make a minyan (prayer quorum), but ten shoemakers can.
A mensh on glik iz a toyter mensh – An unlucky person is a dead person
Me ken nisht tantsn mit eyn tukhus af tsvey khasenes – you can’t dance at two weddings with only one behind
Me zol nutsn dayne kishkes af hengen vesh – May your guts be used as a washing line.
Me zol shoyn nokh dir a nomen gebn – Someone should be named after you already (in Jewish tradition, you only name babies after someone who has died, so this is really a roundabout way of saying ‘drop dead!’)
Want more? I’ve got plenty.
TMT: A lot of your research focuses on Yiddish and Jewish theater in general. In your experience, what makes Yiddish theater so special and distinct from other types of theatre?
DC: The Yiddish theater was a global theater. It was not uncommon for Yiddish artists to travel from Warsaw to Vienna to Paris to New York to San Francisco to Buenos Aires to Johannesburg to Melbourne, often within a single season. There was a running joke among Yiddish actors that the Yiddish theater was like the British Empire where the sun never sets; when the curtain sets in London, it rises in New York. This global mobility brought Yiddish actors into contact with dozens of different theatrical traditions as they traveled the world, and they adopted repertoire, rehearsal methods, and staging practices that they encountered on their travels.
TMT: What will audiences see that they might not expect when they come to see The (*) Inn? Is there anything new or surprising that’s specific to this production?
DC: I won’t give away much, but my hunch is that what’s going to surprise people the most is not our production but the text of the original play itself. Hold on to your seats!
TMT: Finally Debra, throughout this process we’ve been astonished as our definition of Yiddish theater has continued to expand and surprise us. You’ve been along for much of that journey but now we’d like to ask you to add to the definition. What does Yiddish Theater mean to you?
DC: Early in his career, the Tony-Award winning contemporary set designer Ming Cho Lee worked as an apprentice to the great Yiddish theater designer Boris Aronson. Years later, Lee described Aronson’s designs as “an outside comet that fell into the Western world” and opened people’s eyes to “the range and possibility of theater expression.” That’s part of what I find so fascinating about Yiddish theater – a fierce commitment to artistic experimentation was the predominant ideology among Yiddish theater practitioners, particularly between the two World Wars. And I do mean ideology. Actors talked about their “devotion” to the Yiddish stage in terms of “piety,” and they quite seriously spoke of the Yiddish theater as a “temple of art.”
So to me, Yiddish theater is this phenomenal tradition of serious-minded avant-garde experimentation where you never know exactly what you’re going to get. That’s what makes it so exciting.