E-Mail This Article to a Friend Beyond Pinocchio Puppets take on The Dybbuk BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Like a living species, a play survives the test of time if it’s adaptable. We’ve had G.I. Hamlet and a voodoo Macbeth and Medea as a paparazzi-pursued dowdy diva. S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk wasn’t written until 1914, but already the play seems as interpretable as any of Shakespeare’s: it’s taken the shape of a ballet, an opera, and several variations for the stage, including Tony Kushner’s, which debuted at New York’s Public Theatre in 1997. Just three years before that, it had reached another evolutionary stage when writer and award-winning puppeteer Mark Levenson created Between Two Worlds/The Dybbuk with the Oregon-based Tears of Joy Theatre, the country’s second-largest puppet-theater company for adults. Their collaboration makes its area debut at the Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center in Newton next weekend.

Ansky was born in Russia and raised a Jew. As a young man, he rejected his religious tradition, but after trafficking in secular Russian circles for years, he returned to it. Through his new lens of faith, he saw Jewish culture in Europe disappearing, so he embarked on an ethnographic expedition through Eastern Europe. Among the Yiddish folk songs and legends he documented was that of the dybbuk, a demon spirit suffused with mystical thought. Ansky didn’t so much retell a folktale in his play, which he wrote in Yiddish, as incorporate the idea of the dybbuk into a story he created.

But why puppets? Levenson, speaking over the phone from his Manhattan home, says there has to be a "darn good reason" for producing a play made for humans with puppets: it has to add something not possible with humans alone. The phrase "between two worlds," he says, both captures the concept of a dybbuk — a soul that inhabits a human body because the spirit is still rooted in the human world — and describes the visual metaphor expressed by the puppet form. "The play has two levels of reality: the natural and the supernatural. In human theater, there’s one mode of expression: the human actor. You can see only one level of reality in the human theater version. The supernatural can’t be shown. In puppet theater, there are puppets and people, two qualitatively different things, so you can represent two different realities. Puppets represent human characters, and the human performers, in addition to being the puppeteers, are the spirits."

In the story, a poor religious scholar dies upon learning that Leah, the object of his affection, is marrying a wealthy man. The student doesn’t know that his father and Leah’s, old friends, had promised to wed their children. But with the marriage contract and the man’s heart both broken, his soul becomes a dybbuk that inhabits Leah to secure her eternal love. What follows is a clash of earthly and heavenly desires in courtroom trials and exorcism proceedings.

Between Two Worlds uses bunraku, a style in which performers can be seen manipulating and even interacting with the dolls. "Bunraku connects with the dybbuk in my mind," Levenson explains. "There’s the image of the performers hovering over and controlling puppets in the same way ghosts and spirits hover over and control human characters. The play keeps coming up in different forms because it deals with second chances and setting right things that once went wrong, which is so essential to human thought. In life, we don’t have the option to go back and fix things, so we create it in art."

Between Two Worlds/The Dybbuk is hosted by the Jewish Theatre of New England at the Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center, 333 Nahanton Street in Newton, February 28 and 29. Tickets are $12 to $25; call (617) 965-5226.