Vilna’s Got a Golem

By Ernest Joselovitz
Performances on March 5,6, 11, 12, & 13 at 7:30pm

Director: Stephanie Arnold
Scene & Costume Designer: Michael Olich
Lighting Designer: Matthew Robins

Vilna’s Got a Golem is a relatively recent play (1997) that draws on old performance styles from the Yiddish Theatre and themes that go back for centuries in Jewish culture to explore modern ideas about cultural collision, sectarian violence, and revenge.  The play is set in Vilna in 1899 where the Mogulesko Yiddish Troupe is performing a story placed in Vilna in 1540.  The company actors merge with the characters from the story until it is impossible to separate them.  The actors begin as the endearing, bumbling characters of the shtetl, recognizable from Sholem Aleichem stories and Chagall paintings.  But although the play has a comic surface, underneath is the suffering of a people continuously at the mercy of the pogrom.  One of the actors tells the horrifying story of the death of his wife and unborn child at the hands of a mob.  Obsessed with his loss, this actor/character, Zavel, leads a small group of Jewish villagers in bringing to life a Golem, a mythical figure of vengeance.  What begins as a supposed quest for justice turns into a slaughter of people on both sides of the divide, perpetuating the cycle of violence.  And all the while, the lines blur further and further between what is seen as a play within the play and what may be recognized as reality.