An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
This Yiddish stage version of Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy was directed by Jakub Rotman (1901–1994). It might have been inspired by the 1931 American film version of the novel. The film is based on Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy,…
Boston/Sacco and Vanzetti, 1933
Based on Bernhard Blume’sBoston(original title,Im Namen des Volkes![In the Name of the People!]), Boston or Sacco and Vanzetti premiered in 1933 in a small theater on Warsaw's Dluga Street. The play was aboutNicolaSaccoand…
Butterside Down, 1936
Butterside Downwas a play written and mounted in 1936 by the experimental Yiddish puppet theater called Khad Gadyo (founded in 1922). Moyshe Broderzon wrote the macaronic script (of Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew) and the artist Yitskhok Broiner created…
Danton's Death, George Büchner
Written by Büchner in 1835 but not staged until 1902, Danton's Deathfollows the story of Georges Danton, a leader of the French Revolution, during the lull between the first and second terrors. The play depicts Georges Danton who created the office…
Day and Night (Tog un nakht),
The original Yiddish play Day and Night continued Ansky's legacy of ensemble Yiddish theater. Ansky only put fragments of it down on paper which were published in his Collected Works. But he had fully realized it in his imagination and relayed his…
Freud's Theory of Dreams, Antoni Cwojdzinski
Antoni Cwojdzinski (1896-1972) was a Polish comedian and theatrical actor (active under the pseudonym Antoni Wojdan) and a director of theater and film as well as a playwright. He studied drama in Warsaw, Cracow, and Lviv, and, at one point, studied…
Love and Eros, Anton Wildgans
Love and Eros is a four-act play by the Austrian playwright and poet Anton Wildgans (1881-1932). Wildgans’ work mingles expressionism with a focus on daily life.
Race (Rasa), Jan Fabricius
Rasa by Jan Fabricius belongs to a genre called “Indie dramas,” that was comprised of Dutch-language realist dramas set in colonial Indonesia and the Netherlands between 1900 and 1925. Indie dramas typically dealt with issues that confronted…
The Dybbuk on the Polish Stage (1925)
The Polish premiere of The Dybbuk was less well-received than the Yiddish version, though this seemed to be largely due to the fact that by 1925, the theatre-going community was already well- or overly-saturated with the production. In Der Moment,…
