
Description
"Some playwrights want to change the world. Some want to revolutionize theater. Tony Kushner is that rarity of rarities: a writer who has the promise to do both." -New York Times
"As filtered through Kushner, the play has a deep wistfulness about a flawed but rich culture on the precipice of apocalyptic change, about technology poised to tear through ancient truths and the seductions of assimilation ready to devastate whatever culture is left after the slaughters of the twentieth century." -Linda Winer, Newsday
The first part of the book features Tony Kushner's remarkable, imaginative adaptation of The Dybbuk by S. Ansky (from Joachim Neugroschel's translation), with an afterword by Harold Bloom. Considered by many to be the greatest Yiddish drama, The Dybbuk recounts the tale of a wealthy man's daughter who is possessed by the spirit of her dead beloved. Also included in this volume is a selection of stories translated into English for the first time by Joachim Neugroschel, illuminating different aspects of the Jewish mystical world, including possessions, transmigration, fairy tales, parables and miracles.
Product Details
Publisher | Theatre Communications Group |
Publish Date | December 01, 1997 |
Pages | 192 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9781559361378 |
Dimensions | 8.9 X 5.4 X 0.5 inches | 0.7 pounds |
About the Author
Among many honors, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.
S. Ansky, pseudonym for Shloyme Zanul Rappoport, was a Russian-born writer and folklorist. The Dybbuk, Ansky's only complete dramatic work, was written in 1914 and was first produced by the Vilna Troupe in 1920, two weeks after his death.
Joachim Neugroschel has translated 160 books from French, German, Italian, Russian and Yiddish, including works by Kafka, Chekov, Bataille, Sholem Aleichem, and Nobel laureates Thomas Mann, Elias Canetti and Albert Schweitzer. In 1996 he was made a chevalier in France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Reviews
"Kushner's contemporary reading has served to burnish the original's mixture of spiritual exhalation and material poverty, abstract symbolism and exotic superstition." -J. Hoberman, The Forward
"S. Ansky's mystical Yiddish drama The Dybbuk is a play almost perfectly suited to Tony Kushner's tastes and talents. With its evocative picture of a metaphysical world that shadows our own, and the spiritual price to be paid for avaricious self-interest, it has intriguing correspondences with Kushner's own metaphysical epic, Angels in America." -Charles Isherwood, Variety
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