By John Bailey
For a brief moment in the 20th century, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl burned brightly: first as a celebrated short story, then as an award-winning Broadway stage play, and finally as the 1983 film which Barbra Streisand produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in. And that was the end of that.
Jana Zvedeniuk in Yentl, a dark and transgressive tale. Credit: Mark Gambino
The intervening silence is Miss Streisand’s business, too: before making her film she bought out the rights to Singer’s story, and has since ensured that her telling is the definitive one. Which makes the upcoming stage adaptation at Arts Centre Melbourne a curious prospect. What would Babs say?
“Barbra Streisand still owns the intellectual property for the English translation of Singer’s short story,” says director Gary Abrahams.
That ‘English’ offered the loophole. “We adapted it from the original Yiddish.”
Scene from the film Yentl, starring Barbra Streisand.
While Streisand’s take maintains the rough outlines of Singer’s story, the writer has been outspoken about the liberties she took in the retelling. The original tale is dark and often transgressive: as a girl Yentl is denied the chance to study, and so disguises herself as a young man. The resulting complications of love, marriage, religion and gender pile up with an emotional intensity that evaporates in the screen version. Streisand also added plot twists that dissipated the powerful ambiguity of Singer’s story, and excised its astonishing final moment.
Abrahams has written this new adaptation with Elise Hearst and Galit Klas, and says it adheres more closely to the spirit of the original.
“It is so much darker and more fascinating than the film. It crosses into so many interesting layers. The feminist themes, the queer themes, the trans themes, it deals with Judaic mysticism and spirituality in a really potent way. His short stories are fantastic and populated by dybbuks and golems and ghosts, this Yiddish cultural spirituality that is completely absent from the film.”
Yentl director Gary Abrahams with performers Evelyn Krape and Jana Zvedeniuk.Credit: Mark Gambino
This Yentl is bilingual, performed in both English and Yiddish. Surtitles are provided for audience members not versed in the latter, which originally included the cast. A silver lining of last year’s lockdowns was the time it gave them to learn a new language.
There’s a timeliness to this production that its makers are aware of, with trans rights and religious discrimination in the headlines daily. People read the character of Yentl through their own prisms, Abrahams says: it’s not his job to decide on any of those interpretations.
It’s also why the iron-fisted Streisand has clamped around one of literature most multidimensional characters is so lamentable. To define Yentl goes against the very point of the tale.
Ultimately, Abrahams says, this is “the story of a young person who doesn’t feel necessarily male or female and doesn’t necessarily care. They want to be allowed to be themselves and don’t want to be told how they should live and what they should do. So it’s not a dangerous story in that way. It’s a story of freedom and what we’re fighting for when we talk about all of this.”
Yentl is at the Arts Centre’s Fairfax Studio, March 12-26.
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