MOTL DIDNER ORAL HISTORY

CHRISTA WHITNEY:So this is Christa Whitney, and today is December 17th, 2013.  I'm here at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, with Motl Didner, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project.  Do I have your permission to record?

MOTL DIDNER:   Yes.

CW:  Thanks.  So to start, can you just briefly tell me what you know about your family background?

MD:  Unfortunately, I actually don't know very much.  My maternal great-grandmother came from somewhere near Minsk.  She never passed on the name of the shtetl [small town in Eastern Europe with a Jewish community] she came 1:00from, but she came from a shtetl, not from the city.  My maternal grandfather's side said, "somewhere in Prussia," but they probably meant East Prussia -- you know, currently Poland.  The family name is fairly common.  My mother's side is Rosenberg.  My father's side -- the Didners -- my paternal grandfather was born in Budapest, but his father was born in Łódź.  At that time, it was all part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and I guess he relocated from Łódź to Budapest, where my great-grandmother lived.  I know almost nothing about my paternal grandmother's side.  She just said, "Russia," when asked.

CW:  Do you have a sense -- are there any stories or any inkling of what life 2:00was like for any of your old country relatives?

MD:  A little bit.  My paternal grandfather -- the one who was born in Budapest -- he actually passed before I was born.  I'm named for him.  But he had five brothers.  And some of the brothers were alive until I was in my twenties, so I got to know -- and they lived nearby, so I knew them fairly well, and they told us some stories.  I know that my great-grandfather was a glassblower for lightbulbs at the Tungsram firm, which apparently is still in business in Hungary.  And the brothers were -- how to put this -- they were sport thieves.  They used to -- kind of to entertain themselves, they were kind 3:00of like small-time shoplifters and things like that.  And that tradition carried on into their time in America, and actually got a number of them in varying degrees of trouble at times.  In America, they -- several of the brothers, together with my great-grandmother -- were living in a -- they had a chicken farm in Marlboro, New Jersey, which apparently was a thing -- a lot of Hungarian Jews had chicken farms in Marlboro.  Each town, I think, that had chicken farms had people from, I guess, a different area, so they were -- I don't know if they were exactly landsmanshaft [association of immigrants originally from the same region], but they kind of functioned like that.

CW:  Were they frum [religiously observant]?

MD:  No!  Oh, no.  They were actually quite anti-religious -- by that time.  4:00On my mother's side, there were some -- I guess it's going back about four generations, they were pretty frum, but by the time of my great-grandparents' generation -- on both sides -- I think they pretty much rebelled against that.

CW:  So, can you describe your home?  What was Jewish about your home growing up?

MD:  We were, I would say, very assimilated while still being Jewish-ly connected.  My family went to a Conservative synagogue until I was eight, and then we moved from East Brunswick, New Jersey to Morristown, New Jersey.  And there was a Conservative synagogue, but we lived on the side of town that was closest to the Reform, and all the neighbors who we met went to the Reform, so we started going to the Reform, as well.  But even when we went to the Conservative synagogue, we didn't do Shabbos dinners at home.  I mean, we 5:00observed the High Holidays and Passover and Hanukkah, but that was about it.

CW:  Was there an aspect of Jewish culture that you were interested in -- particularly as a child?

MD:  Yeah.  Well, I mean, the thing is that I, as a kid, had this yearning to be deeper into it.  One of the -- I guess, the childhood kind of fantasies -- I had seen the movie, "Lies My Father Told Me," like, twenty times as a kid.  For some reason they showed it on -- around the time I was about, maybe, ten years old, they showed it on TV a lot, and then at Hebrew school, we watched it every year, it seems -- they'd have a movie day, and that was always the movie.  So there's the character of Zaida, who's like an old-world, more traditional, 6:00Talmudic, storytelling zeyde [grandfather], and my grandparents were nothing like that -- the three grandparents who were alive when I was growing up.  They themselves were all American-born, so I kind of had this longing for this, like, more exotic presence.  And when I was a little bit older, my grandmother started introducing elements of Yiddish culture, because I kind of expressed an interest.  They lived in -- when I was -- up until I was fourteen, they lived in Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan, which was on the East Side, and it's fairly close to Second Avenue.  And we used to go to the old Second Avenue Deli -- before it moved to Midtown, when it was at Second Avenue and Ninth Street.  We 7:00used to go it seemed like every week -- on Sundays for lunch.  And there was the Molly Picon room in the back, and we'd always sit in the Molly Picon room, and there were posters of various shows she had done.  And I knew her, of all things, from American pop culture, because she played the grandmother on the TV show "The Facts of Life" -- and that's where I knew Molly Picon from, so it kind of resonated.  And so, as my grandmother started telling me more and more about what the Yiddish theater had been, she also took me when I was, I think, thirteen years old -- twelve or thirteen -- to see "The Golden Land" Off-Broadway, which is a bilingual Yiddish and English show -- which, of course, at the time I didn't know it, but it was created by Zalmen Mlotek, with whom 8:00I've been working at the Folksbiene for now ten years.  So that was one of those early incidents.  Also, when I was about fourteen or fifteen and I was getting into folk music and my grandmother gave me Theo Bikel's kind of seminal -- you know, "Theo Bikel Sings Jewish Folk Songs" -- album, and that also really was very -- a formative experience.

CW:  So, can you just tell me a little more about this grandmother?  What was she like?

MD:  Sure.  Well, she grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home.  She was raised, essentially, by a single mother -- my great-grandfather was -- as far as I understand it, he was kind of, like, kicked out of the house when she was 9:00probab-- I don't know exactly, but about, like, maybe seven or eight years old.  So my great-grandmother, who was the immigrant from Minsk, she was completely illiterate -- she could speak six or seven languages, but she was completely illiterate.  And so she raised two children, essentially, on her own, through the Depression.  So it was pretty rough going.  She was a very practical woman.  She would have been much happier to know that I would have gone to medical school than to theater school.  She actually tried to dissuade me.  On a side note, when I was, I guess, about seventeen and decided that I wanted to be -- to go into the theater for a living, she set up a meeting with this old friend of hers -- an old-time producer named Perry Bruskin, who really 10:00kind of was -- if you've seen "The Producers" -- he kind of was Max Bialystock, right?  He was a big deal at one point.  And he kept an office across from the Ed Sullivan Theater, with all these old posters of shows he had produced, and there was an inch of dust on everything.  And the guy must have been -- I don't know, he must have been eighty or something.  And I remember that he pointed at me with this, like, arthritic finger -- so it was really kind of going off that way -- and he said, "If you can be happy doing anything else -- banker, butcher, doctor, lawyer, anything -- you have no right going into the theater."  And he was right. (laughs) If I could have been happy doing any of those things, I should have done one of those things.

CW:  So, going back to your home, what organizations, institutions, if any, 11:00were your parents, family involved in?

MD:  Well, I found out much later what it meant, but I'm actually a fourth-generation member of the Workmen's Circle.  But I thought it was a burial society, because all I knew about the Workmen's Circle was that my great-grandparents and then later my grandparents were buried in the Workmen's Circle cemeteries.  So it was -- I guess I was twenty-nine years old.  I had been living -- after college -- I went to NYU -- I went to Roanoke, Virginia, of all places, to do an internship at a theater.  I ended up staying for a while, moved to Richmond, Virginia, where I spent six years, started a theater company.  But when I turned twenty-nine, I moved back to New York.  And I was walking down the street -- I live in Park Slope, in Brooklyn -- and I saw a sign on a lamppost from the Workmen's Circle that said, "Come, take a free one-hour 12:00instant Yiddish class."  And it sounded like fun, and it was something I had -- you know, at one point, I got one of those teach-yourself-Yiddish cassette things, and it didn't work at all, so I figured, Okay, sounds like fun.  It's an hour, it's free, what do I have to lose?  So -- you know, it's a sample class to get you to sign up to take more classes, and I did -- and then went on to take the YIVO summer course.  And then I ended up, actually, on the national executive board of the Workmen's Circle for five years, so the Workmen's Circle thing took.  The synagogue thing did not take.  Once I graduated high school, I never went back to -- I didn't join a synagogue again.

CW:  What kind of -- if any -- political environment was there -- or attitude?

MD:  Oh.  Well, I mean, I grew up in a very, very liberal home.  My mother is 13:00a public school teacher.  My father, although an engineer, came from a working-class family -- very much involved with -- electricians, so they were very much involved with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers -- so a very strong, you know, union, labor, home.

CW:  So you already alluded to some of this, but can you give me sort of the bullet points of your education?

MD:  Yeah.  So I went to a public school, and then to a supplemental Hebrew school, growing up, and I continued on after my bar mitzvah through confirmation -- so until I was seventeen.  I went to NYU, where I studied theater -- both at NYU and the -- they have a partial conservatory program, so I did my 14:00conservatory training at the Playwrights Horizons Theater School, where I studied the acting and directing track.  And that's it.  I didn't go to grad school.

CW:  Did you like Hebrew school?

MD:  For the most part, yeah, I did.

CW:  So I want to talk about Yiddish a little bit.  First of all, how would you describe your fluency?

MD:  Pretty fluent -- especially in the -- you know, I would say that up until about five or six years ago, I would describe myself as conversant -- I could hold a conversation in Yiddish, but if I were to try to approach anything literary, I would be looking up every fifth word.  But since I've really kind of been focusing more on developing scripts and have been coming in much more 15:00contact with Yiddish literature, I would say at this point it's really just the loshn-koydesh [Hebrew, lit. "holy language"] -- the really hard words -- that I find myself not familiar with.  But I still make grammatical mistakes in conversation.

CW:  So you mentioned your maternal grandmother was introducing you to Yiddish culture.  Was there any exposure to Yiddish language prior to this Workmen's Circle class?

MD:  Very little.  They never -- my grandparents, of course, both spoke Yiddish, but I think they kind of had abandoned speaking Yiddish amongst themselves quite a while ago.  So there were really very few opportunities to hear conversational spoken Yiddish.

CW:  Do you remember any attitude towards Yiddish -- positive or negative -- 16:00when you were growing up?

MD:  It was definitely positive.  It was kind of like -- you know, at one point, my mother and I had both said, Oh, great, well, let's get grandma to teach us Yiddish -- and you know, it never really happened.  There was interest in it.  But it was certainly never denigrated.

CW:  So, how did that first class go, and could you tell me more about how you got into the study of Yiddish?

MD:  Sure.  The first class was a little chaotic, because it was sort of a weird collection of people -- some of whom had, I guess, maybe, more nostalgic connections to Yiddish, and they would come and constantly correct the teacher if her dialect was different from the dialect they knew.  There were these 17:00people who were perennially in the introductory class -- like, they never got beyond the introductory class, they just kept taking it over and over again.  And then there were people who were, like -- you know, they thought it was a whimsical thing to do, and they might come to, like, one class out of four.  And then there were a few people who were a little bit more serious about it.  But I'm, I think, of that class, probably the only one who really went on to advanced studies.

CW:  And then you went on to the YIVO program after that?

MD:  Yes.  That summer.  So I took one semester of classes at the Workmen's Circle, then I went to YIVO, and then I went back and took the advanced classes at Workmen's Circle.

CW:  Were there any teachers in particular that were mentors or influential for you?

MD:  Oh, absolutely.  Especially at the YIVO.  My three teachers that summer were Anna Gonshor from McGill, Sheva Zucker, who literally wrote the book that 18:00we were using as the textbook -- even before I was in her class -- who, at the time, was at Duke -- and Rivka Margolis, who, I believe -- also at McGill.  And I kind of made a -- I had this hare-brained idea at the time that I was going to go work for the Folksbiene.  I had done a couple of events as a volunteer with the Folksbiene as of that summer, but, you know, I said, "We're gonna get a comprehensive outreach program going" -- I had a background as a professional, kind of do-it-yourself theater guy, so I had been already self-producing and directing and writing, so I thought that I would kind of bring that to the 19:00Folksbiene.  I'll get a little bit more in detail of that story a little bit later on.

CW:  So, what was your impression once you started having access to Yiddish -- about the language -- what did you gain?

MD:  Well, one of the things that I was really kind of hoping to get out of it -- I guess I should have mentioned this earlier -- again, one of those factors that drew me to Yiddish in the first place was -- and it really is coming full-circle now -- is, I'd come across a collection of what they call "Great Jewish Plays" -- it's a collection of three Yiddish plays in English translation by Joseph Landis.  It's "The Dybbuk," "God of Vengeance," and "The Golem."  And of the three, "The Golem," by Leivick, really drew me in.  But I really was 20:00never terribly happy with the translation -- it seemed very outdated, it wasn't really an actable translation, so I wanted to get closer to the source material.  One of the ideas I had, even back then, was, Someday I'm going to direct this play in Yiddish.  And so, as I was early on embarking, I realized, Wow, well, I'm still pretty far away from being able to delve into a text like that.  But there was a big satisfaction of knowing that the doors were kind of opening up.  And one of the things that was very encouraging early on was the realization of this kind of community around Yiddish, because it's still kind of 21:00a fringe within the Jewish community.  I remember my first svive [gathering] that I went to.  Right after the end of the YIVO summer course in 2003, I had gone to a commemoration of the night of the murdered Soviet poets, and I had met about half a dozen people who were there while I was at YIVO.  And they said, Oh, why don't you come with us -- we're going to a svive.  And I wasn't quite sure what a svive was at that point, but it was a gathering -- I think we were at Shoshke-Reyzl Yuni's house, and just that there was this group of people -- they opened -- you know, they met at somebody's house, it was so warm, the conversation was all in Yiddish -- at that point, I was still very much a novice, so, you know, was kind of taking it all in.  But there was sort of the 22:00impression of a cohesive community.  And that -- the social aspect of it -- was probably just as much what drew me further into it than the intellectual side of it.

CW:  So can you -- what grabbed you about "The Golem"?

MD:  Well, it has this spiritual depth that just doesn't exist in many other plays that I've read -- in any language, really.  It's not just that it's mystical, but the moral implications of it -- the way they were just so seamlessly intertwined, the density of the folklore behind it.  Any other golem 23:00story -- the idea of a golem wasn't new to me, but what I knew about it was what everybody knows -- it's Frankenstein's monster, it's just a lifeless robot or whatever.  But here, you've got issues of -- not only the fundamental issues of violence and the results of violence, but really at the heart of the story, it's about a father who doesn't want to take responsibility for being a father.  The Maharal -- the wonder-working rabbi -- creates this thing that he thinks is only a servant of the community, but the golem doesn't see itself that way.  It sees itself as a child who needs its father, and the father withholds attention.  24:00And ultimately, when -- in this version, unlike any other version I've ever seen -- when the golem runs rampant at the end, it's not just because it's a killing machine and that's what it does -- it's specifically trying to get the attention of the rabbi, who's confined him to this little side chamber in the synagogue.  And he's acting like a child -- he refuses to put his shoes on, he won't come when he's called, and -- he just wants the rabbi to come and give him attention.  And when the rabbi doesn't come, that's when he acts out, because he knows he's gonna get his attention.  And that's just something that I hadn't seen dramatized before.

CW:  So, how did you get interested in theater in the first place?

MD:  Oh, that goes back as far as I can remember.  I'd been doing school plays, and actually even wrote a couple of plays and directed -- kind of -- Hebrew school plays and things like that.  So I guess -- it's one of those things when you're -- whether you're on stage or whether you're in the audience watching something you created, there's this -- it's not a -- I wouldn't call it a high, exactly -- there's this, like, kind of transient state.  And I guess some people achieve it through religion; I achieve it through theater.

CW:  So were there any influential particular people in theater training that led you to where you are today?

MD:  Yeah.  At the Playwrights Horizons Theater School, there were a few people who were outstanding in terms of their influence.  One is Bob Moss, who actually founded Playwrights Horizons Theater.  And he, I guess, was most influential my first year in stripping away the notions that one comes to the professional theater with when you're -- you know, everyone is the star of their little high school stage, and when you're sitting in a room with forty other people who are all the star of their high school stage, it really makes you take stock.  And he really pared it down to the basics of good storytelling.  Bob taught me two things: how to tell a good story, and how to identify the theme of 27:00the piece to really get to the kernel of what it's about.  And then there was another teacher, Travis Preston, who really taught us how to access that mythical, spiritual element within the play itself.

CW:  So, how did you first get involved with Folksbiene?

MD:  I really wasn't aware that there was a Folksbiene until I started taking this journey into the Yiddish world.  Even though I had been a theater student in New York and grew up in the New York area, I never knew that there was a Folksbiene, which is really kind of a shame.  But at that time, the Folksbiene 28:00was kind of insular -- it really was more about serving its core audience, it wasn't really doing much to engage people from the non-Yiddish-speaking world.  And so when I started studying Yiddish, I went to -- I guess, the first event that spring was a staged reading of "The Lady Next Door," so I was just strictly audience -- went to the website, saw, oh, well, they're looking for volunteers for things, so I sent an e-mail, "Sure, I'd like to volunteer sometime."  And that spring -- in June -- they had their annual gala at the Ninety-Second Street Y, so I usher -- I think I showed up a couple hours early, I stuffed programs and gift bags and things like that -- and greeted people as they came in.  I tried to show off the one semester of part-time Yiddish class that I had had at that point.  And then I got to watch the show.  And Zalmen made his speech.  29:00And he mentioned the need to get out there and to do better outreach -- to let the world know who the Folksbiene is.  And that's when the lightbulb went off -- like, Oh, I can do this.  And so at the reception afterwards, I walked up to him -- he had not the slightest idea who I was -- and I said, "I'm your guy.  I'm going to make this outreach program happen for you."  And he said, "Okay, sure.  Set up a meeting."  So I met with him, and the message was, Okay, that sounds great.  Where are we going to get the money from?  So I then went into the YIVO summer course and was volunteering at several events -- concerts and things like that -- throughout the summer, and then in the fall as well.  And 30:00then a staff position came open in -- I believe it was October 2003.  So I took a paid staff position at that point in development, and I started writing grants like crazy -- I probably sent out well over a hundred applications to, like, every foundation that supported anything that had anything to do with Yiddish, with Jewish culture, anything.  And it was quite a while later that -- oh, I remember when it was.  The following summer, I had actually worked for the YIVO summer course as assistant to the director -- I was basically coordinating the program in the summer of 2004 -- and I got a call -- I had kind of taken leave from the Folksbiene while was doing that -- saying, "We got a grant.  You got 31:00the seed money to get your outreach program started."  And that was from the David Berg Foundation.  And then we got another grant from the Claims Conference to bring programming to survivor communities.  So I started tapping people who I had met through this summer course who either already were professional performers -- two of them, Jeanette Lewicki and Miryem-Khaye Seigel, were singers -- performers -- who were learning Yiddish, although Miryem-Khaye had already been through the YIV-- so she was already fluent at that point -- and then a couple people who were learning Yiddish and showed kind of a proclivity towards the stage -- Leyzer Burko and Dov Bear Bernstein.  And then we drafted a cantorial student, Ari Slack.  And we started our touring 32:00company, and we rehearsed that through probably about three or four months in the fall of 2004.  And by winter, we were ready to go with a touring show.

CW:  So can you just describe -- maybe not the touring one, but for someone who hasn't been to a Folksbiene performance -- what is the setup, with the supertitles and (unclear; overlapping dialogue)?

MD:  Oh, sure.  We -- for the most part, I should say, 'cause it is slightly -- there has been an evolution -- but typically, we present shows entirely in Yiddish -- sometimes, bilingually, and most recently, we had our first completely English show.  And we project -- either onto a screen or, when we're at our most creative, we find ways to project onto the set -- translations, in both English and in Russian, in real time -- so it's like seeing a foreign film.

CW:  And what is the experience -- or the process for you for directing for a show like that?

MD:  The first step, of course, is identifying the script.  So you have to familiarize yourself with a lot of material until you find something that you kind of fall in love with.  And not always, but typically, we start by having a staged reading, which serves a couple of purposes.  One is that it tests in front of an audience what the response is.  And it also familiarizes the director with the piece -- you get to know it a little bit deeper and more intimately, and you kind of get a sense of the casting.  The casting of a 34:00staged reading is not competitive -- it's by invitation.  And in most cases, most of the actors who end up in the staged reading don't end up in the main stage production, but it gives you an idea of what you're looking for.  And a number of them have tested phenomenally well when we did staged readings or staged concert versions of "The Megile of Itzik Manger," "Gimpel Tam," "Hershele Ostropolyer" -- they did very, very well, and eventually ended up on the main stage.

CW:  So, how did you go about familiarizing yourself with, sort of, the canon of --

MD:  I've got a filing cabinet full of photocopied manuscripts and things like 35:00that, and I still haven't gone through all of them, but I make my way through them.  People bring things to my attention -- you know, Zalmen will remember a play that he had seen forty years ago that we should investigate -- and that has a lot to do with it.  And then there's just following my own curiosity.

CW:  So when did you start directing plays at the Folksbiene?

MD:  Almost right away.  The first play I directed was a train wreck, but it was a lot of fun.  When I had first been talking -- even before we got any of the grants to get the outreach program started -- I was in the theater -- it was during the run of "The Lady Next Door" -- and I was talking to somebody in the audience I knew about, "We've got to get this outreach program started!  We need to get shows out of the theater, out into the communities where people will come see it."  And this guy overheard me having the conversation, and he called me up shortly after that and said, "I want you to bring a Purim-shpil to our 36:00synagogue in Staten Island."  And it turns out that it was, like, a black hat synagogue, and so we had to do an all-male cast.  But that was okay -- that's kind of keeping in the Purim-shpil tradition.  It's not exactly in keeping with my personal values, but we accommodated.  So I wrote this script, which was -- you know, from my experience, you always have to have a shtokh [punch] -- you have to have a bit of rebellion within it.  And Zalmen and Mike Fox, who was one of the writers of -- or Menachem Fox -- one of the writers of "Kids and Yiddish" -- kind of sat me down, and they were so serious, like, You can't say these things.  You know, at the end, I focused on the real end of the Purim 37:00story, of course, when the Jews are given license to go out and massacre all their enemies.  And they're like, You can't talk about that part of the story.  And, you know, pointing out all of the things that they specifically thought were -- that I thought were satirical and very funny, and they were saying, That's not funny at all!  So I went back to the drawing board and kind of re-worked it so that it was -- it was mostly in English, but it incorporated Yiddish Purim songs that I was given.  So I kind of re-worked it, that, you know, would -- 'cause I didn't know the community, I didn't know that they wouldn't have gone for such a thing -- to make it a little bit more what we think of as a nice kind of satiric, fun Purim-shpil.  But because we had members of Actors' Equity in the cast, we were very limited -- I think we could only have twelve hours of rehearsal altogether -- and so it was completely, 38:00completely chaotic -- the process, from soup to nuts.  And I remember Zalmen was very worried -- "We can't put this in front of an audience like this."  And I said to him -- I was very frustrated, and we were just -- we had only been working together for, I don't know, three or four months at that point -- and I said, "Look.  If this is a complete disaster, Monday morning, I will come in, I will pack up my things, and you will never hear from me again."  And so we went forward with the show on a -- I think it was on a -- yeah, it was moytse-shabes, it was a Saturday night.  And at the show -- and I was worried, 'cause I thought it was a complete disaster, too -- but they invited us back for the next year, like, that very night.  It's not like they called me two weeks later and said, By the way, book next year.  They said, We have to have you back.  So I 39:00guess within the mishmash and the disorganization, something very fun happened when we got it in front of an audience.

CW:  So, I want to talk about two specific shows -- first, you acted in "Gimpel Tam."

MD:  Yes.

CW:  Can you tell me about that experience?

MD:  That was a great experience.  So, I had participated in -- I guess I produced the staged reading of "Gimpel Tam" that we had done the year before, and I think I was reading stage directions or something.  And Moshe Yassur was the director.  And he's a Romanian director, and then he moved to Israel for several years and then to America.  And his directing style is very European, 40:00in terms of -- he's used to having a much longer rehearsal process, much more time for experimentation.  And that, combined with his Talmudic knowledge, really plumbed the depths and teased the nuances out of the play.  He actually wrote the stage adaptation himself.  So we ended up with this story that, in many ways, was even more powerful than Bashevis's original.  And when it came time for casting, very few of the people who were in the staged reading ended up actually being cast.  And we had, like, three weeks to rehearse it -- to put it 41:00together.  And there was a lot of pressure.  And when he was -- when we were casting the show -- I was also assistant director on that -- there was one particular character who -- the shadow, the shotn -- you know, the devil who comes and tempts Gimpel at the end to piss in the bread dough and feed it to everyone in the town as his revenge for all of the abuse.  Nobody was giving him the reading -- the characterization that he was looking for.  And I actually tried to coach one of the actors, who I had worked -- quite a bit, to be able to do it -- to get to that mystical place.  This leads back to that 42:00teacher, Travis Preston, who I had mentioned -- how to put yourself into an altered state of consciousness.  And nobody could -- they just couldn't do it.  And I said to Moshe, I said, "Is this what you're looking for?"  And I really had no intention of acting in it.  And he said, "Yes!  Yes!  That's it!  That's it!"  So I kind of ended up making a grand bargain, where I agreed to go in and act in the show -- but only to do that.  I wouldn't do chorusing, dancing, things like that, and the other numbers.  And -- yeah.  That was -- it was -- spectacularly rewarding, that experience.  That was a really -- there 43:00was a great community of actors in that show.  It just -- you know, a very positive experience.

CW:  And then, I wanted to ask about "The Megile" -- Manger's "Megile."  How did you come to that project?

MD:  That's my love.  In many ways, it was sort of the culmination of my career thus far, and the fact that I directed it just -- like, literally, I was in rehearsal on my fortieth birthday, so it was kind of like a landmark, and it's like, this is the culmination of everything I've done so far.  So we had done it as a staged concert about three years earlier, so I was getting familiar with the music and with Manger's twist on the traditional story.  And the Purim shpiel in and of itself is so meaningful, because it is the root of Yiddish theater.  And Purim culturally being somewhat similar to Halloween -- every 44:00theater person, Halloween is their favorite holiday -- that idea of, everybody is sort of in one giant improvisation on Halloween -- we're all gonna disguise ourselves, we're gonna take on other personas.  And Purim has that similar feel to it, and resonated with me because of that, even when I was a kid.  I remember my grandmother making me a -- I don't know why she decided that for -- or no, I'm sorry, I'm conflating stories.  It wasn't Moses, she -- my grandmother was pretty handy with sewing, so she made me a Mordechai costume -- she made me a Moses costume for another thing -- she made me a Mordechai costume for a Purim carnival when I was, I don't know, like, six or something, complete 45:00with, like, big beard.  So, you know, that being -- the Purim-shpil and Purim as a whole being inextricably tied with theatricality.  But a lot of the conventions that I had developed -- in my career before I came to the Yiddish theater, I did experimental theater, and I would love to work in puppets -- or, more specifically, non-traditional puppets.  One of the artists who was really quite influential -- I had only met him once, but I had seen a bit of his work -- is a guy named Paul Zaloom, who -- if you grew up watching -- I don't know, how people of a certain age will remember "Beakman's World" -- it was a science kids' TV show -- that's the same guy.  But in his adult-oriented career, he would do non-traditional things -- like, he would take this tissue box and this 46:00coffee cup and this bounce, and he would create a scene, and within, like, thirty seconds, you would believe that this is a policeman and this is a corrupt government official and this is a field somewhere in Wisconsin -- I mean, that's how creative he is in how he uses things.  So puppetry -- and more specifically, non-traditional puppetry -- were things that I incorporated.  I loved working toys in, and shadows, and things like that.  So "The Megile of Itzik Manger," the production we did, allowed me to, like, throw in the kitchen sink.  And a lot of that has to do with partnering with Jenny Romaine, who has a background in both puppetry and in circus -- so she created the visual world of the play and provided a lot of support in terms of getting puppets beyond 47:00even my experience or wildest imagination.  And we worked in acrobatics -- we actually have a silks routine that's built into it.  And it's just -- it's a good story to begin with, so it really brought in all of the elements that I love about theater.

CW:  Can you just describe -- I mean, Manger's "Megile" is sort of a different --

MD:  Oh, sure.  So Manger uses "The Megile" -- the traditional "Megile" story -- to tell his own story.  And there's a tradition of that.  I've come across a lot of Biblically-based plays that are really not about what they're ostensibly about.  So Manger, he was living in Warsaw when he wrote it -- the poetry cycle -- the music came much later -- he was living in Warsaw in 1937, 48:00and so he kind of conflates the worlds.  So it's got one foot in ancient Shushan and one foot in Warsaw in 1937.  His big twist is that he gives Esther a nice Jewish boyfriend named Fastrigosso -- who is really kind of a stand-in for Manger himself -- who is just this kind of hopeless romantic.  He's a tailor's apprentice, as Manger -- his father owned a tailor shop -- and he is unexplainably jilted by Esther.  So Esther goes off into the beauty contest because her Uncle Mordechai tells her to do so -- and ends up, of course, being whisked off immediately and married, and there's no time to say goodbye, and there's no time to explain what happened.  So all Fastrigosso knows is, one minute, he's in love and it's reciprocal, and the next minute, she's gone off 49:00and married not just anybody but the king.  So, she becomes the queen; he assumes that this is a power grab, he's angry at her, and, of course, he's angry at the king, as well -- as if, you know, he had stepped in and interrupted this relationship.  So where it really gets clever is that Fastrigosso, in a fit of personal rage, attempts to assassinate Achashverosh.  And Haman exploits this.  One of the things that I think is incredibly important about this play that you don't see in many other places -- because it was written in 1937 and it was written in Warsaw -- is that it really explodes this concept of the Holocaust just, like, having started one day.  Like, everything was fine in Poland, and then, you know, September 1st, 1939 happened, and it was all 50:00downhill from there.  And they forget to tell the part of the story that led up to those circumstances.  And what Haman does is really quite clever.  Not only does he exploit the fact that a Jew was a part of an assassination attempt and used that as a justification to unleash his plan -- as we had seen with the Jews who were involved in the earlier Russian revolutions and the attempt on the czar's life being used as an excuse for pogroms -- he plays it out through the media.  It goes out into newspaper editorials and headlines of, you know, Oh, look what these Jews are up to.  And that really was a pivotal part -- starting in the twenties or really even earlier -- even before you get to the Nazi 51:00propaganda paper, "Der Stürmer," and Henry Ford's "Dearborn Independent" -- that anti-Semitism was a daily feature of the press.  Even the mainstream press in Europe, starting, really, in the 1890s -- as newspapers really start to proliferate, you get anti-Semitic political cartoons and editorials, so that in the minds of the masses who are reading newspapers, it's so deeply ingrained.  By the time you get to the thirties, there's already this -- you know, I guess, just widely accepted as fact -- you know, anti-Semitic stereotypes, so that we can kind of transition from, you know, Oh, these Jews, they bring all sorts of 52:00social problems and crime and poverty and disease.  And this is just all accepted, so that when it becomes time to say, you know, They can't possibly have government jobs, they can't possibly study in our universities, we must boycott their businesses, we -- you know, it was a step by step by step process.  They must live separately.  And then when they start disappearing, who notices?  Because by then, they're already out of public life.  Manger kind of like captures this specific place and time in a way that's not broadly documented.

CW:  Can you explain a little bit about what it's like to work with your actors?  How much Yiddish do they have, and what is the process of working with non-fluent Yiddish speakers?

MD:  Our actors really kind of vary in their level of fluency.  Most of the ones who are the most fluent are actually the least professionally experienced.  So when it comes to things like readings and workshops, you kind of want to mix it in, because the ones who are better with the Yiddish will help those who are not quite as fluent with the Yiddish, and those who are more experienced in performance will help those who are less experienced in performance.  So when that happens, then we get a nice, cohesive community around a reading or a workshop.  That's always a beautiful thing.  When it comes time for main stage shows, we really need a higher caliber of performer.  So for the most part, with the exception of a handful of names -- so you're talking about, like, Avi Hoffman, Mike Burstyn, Shane Baker -- you actually get 54:00very few actors who are fluent in Yiddish.  So there are a number who are what I would call very conversant -- you've got people like Suzanne Toren, for example -- Itzy Firestone, of course -- I should have mentioned, he's one that's more or less fluent.  And then you've got actors who are familiar only because of the work they've done with us before -- or they're brand new, and we have to give them transliterated scripts, and we have to, in many cases, provide coaching.  One of the jobs that I have is -- whether I'm directing or whether it's someone else directing -- I'll make a digital line-by-line recording so that they can practice how it's supposed to sound.  And it really kind of doesn't matter.  We usually work in the standardized -- klal -- dialect, but 55:00occasionally, we'll make forays into the theater -- the Romanian or volyner [Volhinian] dialect -- teater-shprakh [theater dialect].  But no matter what dialect, there's always native speakers in the audience who are convinced that their dialect is the only legitimate dialect, and they're going to criticize.  But --

CW:  I wonder if you can talk about this sort of -- you know, during your lifetime, there's been a real generational shift in the Yiddish theater world of going from native speakers to not.  So can you talk about that -- how you observe that?

MD:  Well, in my decade at the Folksbiene, unfortunately, I've seen some of the -- not some, I've seen many of the greats unfortunately pass on.  And 56:00unfortunately, a lot of their knowledge went with them, because generationally, they were not really invested in training those who came after them.  They had their own economic concerns about preserving their own jobs, so -- this predates my time -- so that within the Hebrew Actors' Union, rather than taking in new, younger talent who would've been trained the old school way -- which is by actually working in shows -- you start by being, you know, the third spear carrier from the left, and you work your way up to playing, you know, Lear someday -- but they didn't want -- as the theaters were closing, they didn't want to lose their own livelihood -- which is understandable, but the unfortunate result of it was that they blocked new membership into the union.  57:00And as they aged, it didn't really seem to faze them much that they weren't really suitable for the parts that they were playing.  So, for example, one of the first times I met -- now my mother- and father-in-law, and I told them that I work in the Yiddish theater, they said, Oh, yeah, an eighty-year-old lady in a red wig playing a twenty-year-old!  'Cause that had, by the sixties and seventies, become the joke of the Yiddish theater.  So the way that I would describe it is that the golden chain of continuity -- it wasn't handed to us; it was, like, kind of left lying on the floor, and we had to pick it up and forge our link for ourselves.  So there's good things and bad things about that.  The bad part is that you lose that native voice from the material.  The good 58:00part is that because it wasn't really in any meaningful way part of our personal backgrounds, it means that it's not bogged down in nostalgia, and we're not trying to recreate what once was -- we're kind of bringing a new sensibility to it.  So it allows it to be something new and fresh.  So, like, with "The Megile of Itzik Manger," it's kind of a perfect example.  I wasn't alive yet when it ran on Broadway in '68, so I can't try to recreate that production.  It's not on film.  There's an audio recording of it.  But to me, it allowed me to kind of dream about what it could be just based on hearing the music and reading the text.  And so the actors that we bring in also kind of bring that 59:00fresh perspective, because we're having to define it for ourselves.  Yeah, it's frustrating that I don't have a company of a hundred young Yiddish-speaking actors to choose from.  But more and more people are coming to us, and not all of them are working towards fluency, but a number of them have been taking classes and are learning.

CW:  Who is the audience for Yiddish theater today?

MD:  It's a little hard to nail down.  On the one hand, the audience skews older.  But in my opinion, that's the case of all theater, not just Yiddish theater, because theater is expensive and theater requires time.  And on a 60:00social level, you can't compete -- people in their twenties and thirties who are not married, they go to clubs, they go to bars, they go to places where they're going to meet other unmarried twenty, thirties people.  Then, the social trend -- you get married, you have -- these days, people get married in their early thirties, they have kids fairly quickly 'cause of biological reasons -- I myself have young children now -- and you kind of disappear from the scene.  You just don't have the ability to go out and see theater.  So you kind of re-emerge from that when the kids are older -- high school age or college age.  And that's also around the time that you start hitting, like, fifties -- like, mid-fifties -- so you start seeing that older demographic are the population 61:00coming to the theater.  We do get younger people, as well, but they're part of that fringe Yiddishist crowd.  So that's limited -- that's, you know, a couple hundred people.  But one of the things is that I don't really see our audiences diminishing.  The fear is, Oh, all the native Yiddish speakers are dying, they're all really old!  And while it's true -- we're certainly losing a lot of our native Yiddish speakers -- the thing is that the baby boomer generation is starting to hit retirement, and they're starting to come.  Because they're moving into these retirement communities, and they're joining these Jewish culture clubs that these gated retirement communities have, and they're coming with the groups.  So for those that we're losing, we are finding that there are new older people who are coming.  They don't necessarily speak Yiddish, and 62:00that means that a greater percentage of our population relies on reading the supertitles.

CW:  Now, lately, you've gotten into translation.  Can you -- well, how did you first get into translation?

MD:  I started translating just for the purpose of creating supertitles -- for shows that -- mostly shows that I was directing, but not only.  One of my jobs as the artistic director is to create supertitles for all sorts of events -- so, concerts and things like that.  Sometimes, I'll take an existing translation and use that, but more and more, I was finding that I was making my own translations.  And they weren't actable and they weren't really publishable -- it was just about, like, get the main idea out there as economically as possible, because people have to read this in real time.  So that presents its 63:00own challenges.  And so when the Book Center put out its call for applications for the translation fellowship, my first thought was, Well, my translations could be better.  And so I saw this as an opportunity to work not only with peers but with professional mentors and instructors to understand the art form a little better.  And it's really -- it succeeded.  I was only able to attend two of the three workshops, but of the two that I attended, the ideas that were presented by the seasoned translation instructors really hit home, in terms of how an audience who is not -- you know, assuming that they're not at all familiar with the base language, how would they understand this material?  And 64:00it's a big responsibility, because with Yiddish, it's not just that -- every language has its challenges in translation, but there are a lot of cultural ideas within -- that are captured within this Yiddish material that don't even really exist in the Jewish world today as it's practiced -- folk practices, things like that -- so that you really have to translate not just the language, but you have to translate a culture.  It's very challenging.

CW:  How has working with Yiddish materials made you think about -- or has it 65:00changed your relationship to European Jewish identity -- your yikhes [ancestry] from Eastern Europe?

MD:  It's made me understand it.  It's funny, because as a secular Yiddishist, I understand more about Judaism than I did when I was religiously practicing.  Because the -- you know, even within the Conservative synagogue experience I had, it was still so American, it was so assimilated, it was so -- it was so far removed from what I now understand Jewish life was like.  So, you know, it doesn't inspire me to go native -- it's not like I want to start adapting -- 66:00adopting superstitious practices and things like that, but it certainly makes me understand things that were derived from that world in a better way.

CW:  So, how often do you get to speak Yiddish?

MD:  Oh, I would say five days a week.

CW:  And what is your relationship to the Yiddish scene -- the svive -- in New York?

MD:  Well, since having kids, I kind of dropped out of the Yiddish social scene, but it's good to know that when I peek into it, I see a lot of new people.  Every year, more people coming to the YIVO program or coming to New York from any one of the -- you know, from the Book Center, from one of the many Yiddish programs in colleges.  And so it's growing, and it's staying young.  67:00It's nice that, as a forty-year-old, when I look at who's coming to the Yiddish world now, I'm seeing people who were my age when I came to the Yiddish world, and even younger.  So that's very encouraging.

CW:  Do you have any ideas or thoughts about why people are attracted to the Yiddish world?

MD:  I can't speak for everybody, but I can speak for myself.  One of the things that was so notably missing from my own Jewish education was the crucible in which Jews, as I know them, became who they are.  So my education focused on, of course, bar mitzvah preparation -- just, Learn what you need to say so that you can say it and be done with it -- was kind of like one attitude of 68:00Hebrew school.  But when it came to learning Jewish history -- you know, there was, like, ancient history up until the destruction of the Second Temple; then, with the exception of a few American success stories, nothing else really interesting happened to the Jews until the Holocaust, and then came Israel.  And it really skips over, like, well, what happened between the second century and the twentieth century?  And there was this disconnect -- even when I was learning about contemporary Israeli society and culture, and having visited Israel, there was kind of like a disconnect.  It's like, Well, these are -- yeah, they're Jews, they're not -- it doesn't feel the same as the Jews who I know through my family, and there's a link that's missing somewhere in there.  69:00And Yiddish -- you know, Yiddish culture, in fact, was that link.  So it's not just about the language, but it's -- you're opening up many chapters of history.  So when I say, Okay, I grew up in a family that was very, you know, leftist, that was very labor- and union-oriented, well -- okay, well now I understand why.  I understand how we came to that point.  It wasn't something that just occurred overnight.  And so -- yeah.  So I think Yiddish helped me kind of unpack a big part of my identity.

CW:  I just want to clarify -- when you are typically working on a Yiddish 70:00play, how much of your directing -- like, what happens in which language?

MD:  It depends on who I'm working with.  With the troupe -- our touring troupe -- because it has a higher number of Yiddish speakers, we tend to work much more in Yiddish.  So, there's -- and our musical director, Zisl Slepovitch -- it's very weird.  There's just certain people -- Zisl, Miryem-Khaye Seigel, Leyzer Burko -- it's very -- it feels weird for me to speak English with them, so we tend to work together in Yiddish.  There are some actors who are a little bit -- you know, more towards the beginning of their understanding of Yiddish conversationally, and it's more economical to work with them in English, because 71:00it just takes too long to try to explain and translate and -- so you give them the script.   But as far as how I direct it, I direct it in English -- when it comes to main stage shows.  With very few exceptions.  On "The Megile of Itzik Manger," Shane Baker -- the production we did last April and May -- Shane Baker was the only fluent Yiddish speaker in the whole cast, so he and I mostly would -- you know, when it's just giving him direction, it would be in Yiddish, but the others would be primarily in English.

CW:  Do you consider yourself an activist?

MD:  Yes.  Definitely.

CW:  So what does that mean to you?

MD:  Walking the walk.  It's not just that I hold this ideal about promoting 72:00Yiddishkayt through Yiddish language, but it's in my practice -- it's professionally what I do, it's socially what I do.  You can't just kind of lament the -- I think the 1890s or something was the first time that a newspaper proclaimed the death of Yiddish.  There's people who just kind of lament it and don't really do much about it.  But I've been getting out there.  I bring a lot of new actors into the realm.  I provide the work -- the material -- for them.  And ultimately, bringing a Yiddish language experience to -- at this -- you know, over the years, I'm sure, were somewhere around a hundred fifty or two hundred thousand people who we've been able to reach.

CW:  What connection, if any, is there between your work and personal life?

MD:  In many ways, it's kind of seamless.  My personal life, really, at this point, consists of my family.  And there's a few areas of my personal life that are a bit outside of the Yiddish theater realm -- just in terms of, like, being an active parent with my daughter's school, things like that.  But we socialize with some of the actors who we work with, and other artistic collaborators.  These are personal friends as well as colleagues.

CW:  Do you speak Yiddish at all at home?

MD:  Some.  One of my regrets is that with my -- I have a four-year-old and a two-year-old.  One of my regrets is that I wasn't better about getting them to be bilingual earlier.  We raised them -- in the earliest years of -- where they're learning language -- to speak English, because my wife speaks some 74:00Yiddish, but she's not fluent, and none of our children's grandparents speak Yiddish.  So we raised them to speak English, because that's primarily who their caretakers are.  So we're introducing it -- I always sang them Yiddish songs, and with my four-year-old daughter, we're -- we introduce things like the days of the week in Yiddish and things like that.  And so she's curious, and she says, like, "How do you say 'pillow' in Yiddish?" or "How do you say 'chair' in Yiddish?"  So, you know -- so it's getting there.  And we do plan to give them their Jewish education through a Workmen's Circle shule.

CW:  So, I have a few more things, but I'm wondering if there's anything that you really want to talk about that I haven't asked you yet.

MD:  I think -- we've covered an awful lot. (laughs)

CW:  Yeah.  Any other meaningful performing experiences or directing experiences?

MD:  You know, as a performer, other than "Gimpel Tam," I haven't done any main stage shows.  But I love traveling with the troupe.  We do fun shows.  It's not the highest, you know, literary form of theater.  We try to draw from good sources, so we do sketches that come from Sholem Aleichem and things like that.  But it's more of a Yiddish Theater 101.  But the point of the shows we do is to go out there to people who are not part of our hardcore Yiddishist audience and give them a good, positive experience with Yiddish theater so that they'll come -- it's sort of the theatrical equivalent to that instant Yiddish class that I took.  It's a teaser that's meant to hook you.  Because you say, 76:00Oh, it was fun.  It was funny.  I had a great time, even though it was in Yiddish.  I don't speak Yiddish, but I could follow the translations.  Now I get what the modern Yiddish theater -- post-modern Yiddish theater -- is.  And yes, it is for me.  But we have a lot of fun, doing these little, very low production value, barnstorming kind of shows.  So I do enjoy that.

CW:  What do you see as the future of Yiddish theater?

MD:  That's what we're working towards, is that sort of redefinition.  And that's -- there's really nothing new.  I mean, people kind of make airs that, like, there was this grand Yiddish theater tradition -- and they claim to know what it was -- but the reality is that Yiddish theater got started in a very small way in the 1860s, and by the 1900s, it had kind of radiated out, but there 77:00was never monolithic.  I mean, there were experimental -- expressionistic Yiddish theaters in Europe when expressionistic theater was popular in Europe in general, there was the kind of more -- what we think of as the schmaltzy shund [deemed to be of inferior quality] theater, there was literary theater that was following the trends of, like, Ibsen and Strindberg, and there was world plays in Yiddish translation.  So Yiddish theater was never, like, one single thing.  And Yiddish theater still isn't one single thing.  And it's just going to follow, to an extent, whatever the theatrical trends, in general, are.  It will incorporate technology the way that other theaters are.  It might be 78:00amazing to see Spiderman flying around over a Broadway stage today; when that technology becomes more widely used, you're gonna see Chagall's flying fiddlers and things like that.  I mean, I'm sure that that'll make its way in at some point.  Right now, even "The Megile of Itzik Manger" is very esoteric in its approach, but that's postmodern -- is that you can tell a story partially through animation, partially through naturalistic staging, partially through modern dance.  I mean, that's the trend that it's pulling from.

CW:  Well, I'm wondering if you have -- is there -- I mean, obviously, this is a long career already, but I'm curious if there's any particular piece, line, 79:00song, monologue from -- that has -- that sticks out or is particularly meaningful for you.

MD:  Oh, boy.  That's a tough question.  I can't really boil it down to a single line or even to a monologue.  I'm always looking towards something that will capture my imagination to the extent that when I'm reading it, I really can visualize what it is or can be.  And inevitably, when you actually get in -- with collaborators, and in the rehearsal process, it turns out to be something very different than what you had seen in your imagination -- usually, something better.  But it all comes back to Leivick.  I still haven't directed "The 80:00Golem."  And I found another piece, "Di khasene in fernvald [The wedding in Fernwald]," which is, besides the "Der nes in geto [The miracle in the ghetto]," it's the other piece that I'm translating for my fellowship -- and that's the next one that I've fallen in love with.  And that one, I actually want to tackle sooner.  I'd like to tackle that within the next few years.  "The Golem," I think, is gonna have to wait a little bit.  And part of it is because -- one of the things I told myself -- because it really, at its heart, is about fatherhood, I said, "I can't possibly understand or direct this play until I'm a father."  Well, now I'm a father.  And I'm starting to understand the child's longing for a parent.  And I can't wait to get home to my girls from Boston this afternoon.  But now that I'm under -- it's just one of those things that with age and wisdom, I understand that particular play better and better.  So I 81:00don't really feel bad if it's still a couple of years off.  It's a very difficult piece to try to stage.  But -- so, yeah.  I think not in terms of a line or a monologue, I think in terms of stories that I haven't had a chance to tell yet, and that's what kind of drives me, personally, towards the future.

CW:  So, I'd like to close just by asking you if you have an eytse.  Do you have a piece of advice for aspiring artists?

MD:  Yeah.  You have to find whatever it is that you're really passionate about, and you have to work very, very, very hard.  For me, that passion was -- you know, I'd done theater for many years before coming to the Yiddish theater, but the Yiddish theater is really where that passion is.  And it's hard to learn another language.  And you have to give yourself the space -- you have to 82:00clear enough space in your life -- in order to do that.  Because it doesn't matter -- you know, it all -- going back to that idea of, you know, you may have been the star of your high school stage, but -- and that gets you to that next step, but the theatrical training needs to be taken seriously, and that's very hard work.  And if you do choose to work in a foreign language, you have to really, really, really work at knowing that.  And it's an ongoing process.  I'm still learning.

CW:  A hartsikn dank [Thank you very much].

MD:  Nishto farvos [You're welcome].

CW:  Thanks so much for taking the time.

MD:  S'iz a fargenign [It's a pleasure].

CW:  Far mir oykhet [For me as well].

[END OF INTERVIEW]