Vilna Troupe - Later Years

Later Years

After the breakup of Dramă şi Comedie, there were several revivals of the Vilna Troupe in New York City over the next decade or so. The first of these was a revival of The Dybbuk at the Grand Theater in April 1926. In late summer 1926 they were at the Liptzin Theater performing Rasputin and the Czarina.

In March 1929, they were playing Clement Gottesfeld's Parnuse ("Business") in The Bronx, New York. The production moved in May to the Yiddish Folks Theater at Second Avenue and East 12th Street, near the center of New York's main Yiddish theater district of the time. Director Jakob Rotbaum began his professional career staging Eugene O'Neill's works with the troupe in 1930.

Shows continued to be produced in Bucharest under the Vilna Troupe name even after 1927. Following the breakup of Dramă şi Comedie, a play The Flood was put on at the Baraşeum theater, which was loosely the story of the Vilna troupe. In a March 1929 article for Cuvântul newspaper, Mihail Sebastian announced that the company was returning to Bucharest. In early 1930, company actors also staged Isaac Leib Peretz's A Night in the Old Marketplace, later described by Crohmălniceanu as one of the "memorable dates in the history of European Yiddish theater", alongside 1925's Der Zingher fun Zain Troirer. The production, directed by Sternberg, was the subject of a "literary trial" in the intellectual community: Sternberg's radical modernist approach was scrutinized by the more reserved authors Camil Petrescu and Barbu Lăzăreanu, but their accusations were denied merit by a pro-avant-garde group comprising Maxy, Sandu Tudor and Ilarie Voronca. References to the troupe and its role were also present in Maxy's overview of modernist performances in Romania, published by unu magazine in February 1931.

In January of the following year, the fate of the company was also discussed by Sebastian, in his column for Cuvântul. The writer, who had followed the Vilna Troupe's activities over the previous decade, was reviewing Joseph Kamen's return to the Romanian stage with another group of actors. Remembering his impression of the original troupe's shows, Sebastian spoke of its "melancholic destiny": "ever since then, death, dissipation and perhaps fatigue have passed through all these things. udith Lares, who sleeps her eternal sleep in some town in Transylvania., who confronts an infamous public in America. Stein, lost in some place I don't recall."

The company disbanded again in 1931. Still, several members of the troupe continued on occasion to perform together in the United States. In September 1936, Sonia Alomis, Alexander Asro and Noah Nachbush performed a program of short pieces at the New School for Social Research, which The New York Times said "remind us that they are still an active force in theater." Among the plays performed were Sholom Aleichem's Kapores, Mikhail Artsybashev's one-act Jealousy, Der Tunkeler's Should I Marry, or Shouldn't I?, and Veviorke's A Philosopher—A Drunkard. Several members of the troupe participated in a 1937 New York revival of The Dybbuk, directed again by David Herman.

The Vilna Troupe's success with The Deluge had made various Romanian intellectuals seek to preserve the text in a Romanian-language translation. This was first attempted in 1928 by an author named Iosif Vanciu, but its staging by the National Theatre Cluj received bad reviews. During the final stages of World War II, following the King Michael Coup (August 23, 1944), the project was resumed by Baraşeum and Sebastian, resulting in a loose adaptation based not on Berger's original, but on the text as performed by the Vilna Troupe. In his stage program for the play, Sebastian offered additional praise to his predecessors, but noted that, although "excellent", the Vilna Troupe's text had to be adapted for being too "sketchy".