My interview subject is Debra Caplan. She is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Baruch College. Her research focuses on Yiddish theater and drama and its global impacts, as well as theatrical travel and immigrant performance culture. She is a stage director, dramaturge, and translator for the theater. She is currently working as the dramaturge for Target Margin Theater to develop two seasons of Yiddish theater material.
Can you tell me what made you interested in Yiddish theater study?
It’s a long story. In my family, Yiddish was very big. My father spoke Yiddish, so I was interested in it as a language where my family came from. I was always interested in theater. I went to theaters a lot as a kid, and I felt like theater was a special place where anything could happen. You never knew what would happen next, so the reason [why] I was interested in Yiddish theater is that I was always interested in theater. Then I became interested in theater culture, so it was the meeting place of those two interests.
How did you come up with the idea of studying the global impact of Yiddish theater movement?
It’s a natural fit. The most interesting thing to me about the Yiddish actors and theater companies is [that] they were always moving and Jews in the early twentieth century and late nineteenth century were always sort of culturally homeless. There was no single place that they could call home and that [fact] is part of what I think makes Yiddish culture fascinating; but for theater artists, it was even more geographically unsettled because they were constantly traveling in order to survive. When I started to read about actors who were traveling to seventy cities in a year, it was really interesting. What does it do with the art you make if you go to many places and meet different people? How does it change the way you make your theater compared to those artists who are sitting in Berlin, Warsaw, or London?
What is Vilna Troupe and how does it interest you?
The Vilna Troupe was a very famous Yiddish theater company that started in World War I and ended before World War II. It was a big deal because it was between the two world wars. The reason why I found it so fascinating in particular is [that] it was like a viral sensation in the 1920s when there was no internet and no such thing as viral sensation, but the company went viral in that it was traveling all over the places. It came to a city and people were starting to write about it and they wrote letters to people in other cities saying, “have you heard of this amazing company? I hope it come visit you soon.” By the time the company got to the next city, people there already knew about it. They were waiting with bated breath to see what the company would do, so the company was a phenomenon. I think things that go viral are just culturally interesting.
Tell me about your Digital Yiddish Theater Project.
It’s a very new project in progress, but basically there is a group of thirteen scholars from across the country and around the world…. We are coming together to create an ultimate web portal where you will be looking at a map. It is something you can interact with. Let’s say you click on New York City, zoom in, and you see all of the interesting places of Yiddish Theater in New York City. Then you can click on people working over there, you can click on plays held there, or you can click on people remembering going to these theaters and see how they talk about theater. You can interact with this whole world of Yiddish theater that has not disappeared but doesn’t exist the way it did many years ago.
What has your experience been with the Target Margin Theater as a dramaturge?
I started working with them last year and I am still working with them now. A dramaturge does a lot of different things. Most of the roles in a theater are clearly defined. The director directs, costume designers design the costumes, and the actors act. What a dramaturge does depends on the production and how a specific production defines a dramaturge’s role. That is one of the fun things about being a dramaturge because you are always doing different kinds of work…. I am working with people there to help them find material, translate material, and basically figure out how to pull the seasons together; then on the level of individual production, I am meeting with the actors and answering their questions. A lot of what we have been doing has been partially in Yiddish so I am doing some dialect coaching [by] recording the lines for the actors so that they can hear the right accents to learn it [language]. It’s an on-going project. There will be a big production in March.
You are also a theater professor. Can you tell me if you have some inspiration during the interaction with students in your class?
Absolutely! I will give you an anecdote. Last week, at the end of one of the classes I was teaching, a student came up to me and said, “professor, after this conversation we had today, I am not sure what theater is anymore because of all the things you were just talking about. I wouldn’t have thought that they [those things] were theater but now I think they are, so now I don’t even know what it is anymore.” I said, “that’s great,” because to me, that’s exactly the best part about this job; I get to expose people to something new and hopefully take them on a journey where they figure out how they relate to it. I love the fact that I have students who have never seen a play before in my introduction to theater classes, because their perspectives on what it is like to go to a play is so interesting and it’s different from my own as somebody who has gone to see theater all my life.
How do you think theater education can develop the students’ creativities?
What theater does is to put everything on the table. On the stage, you can just create any world you want. You can talk about any topic that you want to [talk]. I think the theater is a marvelous way to get started about almost anything. It meets you where you are. It’s a form instead of a subject…. I think what theater does is to take things and complicate them. I see theater education as something that can open up people’s minds and get conversations started about lots of different and important issues in the world.
