The State Jewish Theatre announces that rehearsals have begun for THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE OF DREAMS, after the play by Peretz Hirschbein, DI NEVEILE, directed by Alexandru Weinberger-Bara. The opening will take place on Saturday 4 April and the production is performed in Yiddish.
In an atmosphere thick with tension and human fragility, the production traces with great delicacy the struggle between hope and disillusion, between the dream of a better life and the hard reality of a marginality that never lifts. Hirschbein's text brings to the fore the recurrence of the human condition and its vulnerabilities, seen through eight characters living on the edge of society, in a world of contrasts and conflicts that returns again and again in the relationships between them.
On the world of Peretz Hirschbein's writing, the director Alexandru Weinberger-Bara says that "he treats the loss of human dignity within a deeply unjust economic system in extremely raw, violent language, close to Sarah Kane and in-yer-face theatre. The text tells the story of a chronic social wretchedness the characters are no longer able to save themselves from. This is not an individual failure but a social and political one. Although Peretz Hirschbein confines himself to the individual suffering of the eight characters, I want to anchor the text in the present by inventing a new dramaturgical layer. My intention is to build a bridge between these very finely drawn characters and a critical commentary on the neoliberal system that produced the economic inequality we live in today."
Peretz Hirschbein (1880-1948) is one of the leading figures of modern Yiddish culture: playwright, prose writer, journalist and director, a complete artist of the first half of the twentieth century. Born in the Grodno Governorate, Poland, the son of a miller, Hirschbein grew up in a shtetl and was educated in Grodno and Vilna, in yeshiva student circles concerned with theology, Hebrew and Jewish history. His literary debut wavered between Hebrew poetry and Yiddish prose, but his true vocation took shape in drama. His play Miryam (1905) already showed a leaning towards a certain kind of atmosphere and a cast of characters marked by naturalism.
In 1908 Hirschbein moved to Odessa, where he published the play Yoyel. Soon afterwards came Af yener zayt taykh (On the Other Side of the River), his first Yiddish play, produced in Russian in Odessa. That same year, in Odessa, he founded the celebrated Hirschbein Troupe, the first Yiddish company devoted entirely to art theatre. He staged his own plays as well as those of writers such as Sholem Aleichem and Sholem Asch. After the troupe disbanded, Hirschbein reached the height of his dramatic writing with the four masterpieces of the Yiddish repertoire: A farvorfn vinkl (A Forsaken Nook, 1912), Di puste kretshme (The Haunted Inn, 1913), Dem shmids tekhter (The Blacksmith's Daughters, 1918) and Grine felder (Green Fields, 1918). His legacy is a theatre of exceptional subtlety, translated and performed internationally, and the film Grine felder, directed by Jacob Ben-Ami and Edgar G. Ulmer (1937), is considered one of the most important works of Yiddish cinema.