The messianic temporality of theatre in I. L. Peretz’s At Night in the Old Marketplace

ABSTRACT

Theatre, as an art form that unfolds through time and moulds temporal experience, engages with its surrounding culture’s temporal imagination, the ways in which society conceives time, its movement, structures, and meaning. I. L. Peretz’s enigmatic and avant-garde Yiddish drama, At Night in the Old Marketplace, utilizes this potential of the theatre to tackle the question of messianic time and the ways in which it can be realized on the stage. By evoking Jewish traditions regarding the Messiah, religious nocturnal rituals, and the dynamics of Carnival, Peretz reconfigures messianic time as a radical, recurring yet fleeting, temporal experience. Theatrical temporality has affinities with messianic time because both are transitory and charged, condensed and ephemeral, and disjointed from the experience of time in everyday life. Rather than imagining messianic time as an eternal future to be awaited, Peretz’s play invites us to ponder in the theatre about the possibility of a messianically charged, albeit always fleeting, present.

KEYWORDS:

• I. L. Peretz
• Yiddish drama
• Jewish theatre
• messianic time

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Glenda Abramson and the anonymous readers of JMJS for their constructive feedback, as well as Zehavit Stern for her thorough comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Yair Lipshitz is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts in Tel Aviv University. His main field of research is the various intersections between theatre, performance, and Jewish religious traditions. He is the author of two books in Hebrew: The Holy Tongue, Comedy’s Version: Intertextual Dramas on the Stage of “A Comedy of Betrothal” (2010) and Embodied Tradition: Theatrical Performances of Jewish Texts (2016). He has also published several papers dealing with topics ranging from Jewish-Italian theatre in the Renaissance to the reception of King Lear in Hebrew theatre, and from the reactivation of rabbinic ritual in contemporary Israeli performance to the queering of Scripture in Angels in America.

Notes

1 Peretz continued to rework his drama over and over again: several versions of the play have been published, with the final one after his death in 1922. Additional fragments, individual scenes, and related poems also exist (Shmeruk 1971, 3–65). In this paper, I will mainly discuss the final published version of the play, for reasons that will be made clear later.

2 The play's first successful production (albeit with many extensive revisions) was staged only in 1925 in Moscow, by the celebrated avant-garde Soviet Yiddish theatre, the GOSET, and directed by Alexei Granovsky in a production considered by many to be one of the peaks of modernist Yiddish theatre. See Raviv (1980), Gordon (1985), and Veidlinger (2000, 61–64). It has rarely been staged since.

3 While a dramatic text is not a performance per se, Peretz clearly conceived it as a text to be realized onstage, as made clear by the elaborate directions for stage design (including a diagram) attached to the text (Peretz 1947, 185–187, 1992, 3–4). Thus, as a text intended for theatrical realization, it already has potential performative values that should be analysed as such. See also Shmeruk (1967, 1971, 145–193).

4 See, for example, Babylonian Talmud, tractate Bava Metzia 83b:

What is the meaning of that which is written: “You bring on darkness and it is night, when all the beasts of the forests stir” (Psalms 104:20)? “You bring on darkness and it is night” – this refers to this world, which resembles nighttime.

Palestinian Talmud, tractate Berakhot 1:1:

Rabbi Hiyya the Great and Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta were walking in the Arbel valley at daybreak, and they saw the beginning of dawn [ayelet hashaẖar, lit. “the hind, or the gazelle, of dawn”] as daylight broke. Said Rabbi Hiyya the Great to Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta […]: “So is Israel's redemption. It starts little by little; the further it proceeds – the larger it grows.”

5 For a fascinating discussion of Peretz's handling of the Tikkun ẖatsot element in his short story “If Not Higher,” in relation to its hasidic sources, see Ross (2012, 2013, 76–78).

6 On the badkhn in the wider context of Fool traditions in Jewish culture, see Erik (1928, 150–162) and von Bernuth (2016, 43–59).

7 The badkhn clearly alludes here also to the Pesach Seder, another night of redemptive performance.

8 Novershtern even notes that the first lines allude to a popular Yiddish theatre song: "גאָט און זײַן משפּט איז גערעכט" (“God and His judgement is just”). However, for Novershtern, the omission of a direct mention of God in this allusion proves that Peretz wishes to move away from any religious interpretation of the ending (Novershtern 1994, 152–153). I find it to work the other way around, by imbuing the rooster and temporal order with divine qualities.

9 Later, during the twentieth century, other Jewish theatre artists continued exploring these affinities, including Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin and American performance artist Deb Margolin. On Levin, see Lipshitz (2013); on Margolin see Dolan (2005, 56–59).