Yentl poses fresh questions in the age of gender fluidity

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s iconic story is finding new audiences in a dark and sexy production that might shock both Isaac Bashevis Singer and Barbra Streisand.

YENTL, THE YESHIVA BOY, has come a long way since she first appeared in an Isaac Bashevis Singer story in 1962.

To the great Yiddish writer, the girl who disguised herself as a yeshiva boy in order to pursue Talmudic studies, was a tragic figure caught between two realities: a woman’s body and a man’s world.

Twenty years later, in the hands of Barbra Streisand, Yentl was transformed into a sentimental feminist hero, adored by cinema audiences and dismissed by Singer.

The production created in Melbourne is for a world that has changed in ways Singer – and probably even Streisand – could never have imagined.

This Yentl comes to us in an age of transgender and non-binary identities when it is increasingly understood that one can be born in a body which doesn’t match one’s gender identity. It makes exchanges like this one between Yentl and her father peculiarly resonant.

“Yentl, you have the soul of a man.”
“So why was I born a woman?”
“Even Heaven makes mistakes.”

This Yentl is produced by Kadimah Yiddish Theatre. Adapted by Gary Abrahams, Elise Hearst, Galit Klas and Evelyn Krape, it was premiered in 2022 at Arts Centre Melbourne and is currently being revived at the Malthouse. and will play at Arts Centre Melbourne from  March 12-26.

Yentl traces the story of the eponymous young woman as she joins the yeshiva disguised as a boy named Anshel and becomes drawn into a hopeless love triangle with her study partner Avigdor and his fiancée Hadass.

Singer wrote Yentl in Yiddish but even in translation the story has the flavour of the shtetl. It has been suggested that the character of Yentl was based on Singer’s elder sister Esther Kreitman, a largely ignored Yiddish writer, whose first novel includes a woman who studies in secret.

Singer is interested in the spiralling deception which sucks the characters into a whirlpool of sin, heartbreak and loss. The writer carries no candle for the injustice of Yentl’s predicament. Feminism in its modern form was still in utero; Betty Friedan’s seminal The Feminine Mystique was published a year after Yentl appeared.

The story ends tragically with Yentl disappearing. The implication is that she is forever an outsider, a Cain-like figure condemned to wander, while the rhythms of shtetl life resume behind her.

Singer was scathing about the musical film, particularly its optimistic ending, which puts Yentl on a ship bound for the new world, singing “What's wrong with wanting more? If you can fly, then soar/
With all there is/ why settle for just a piece of sky?” 

In a short “interview with himself” for the New York Times, he scoffed: “What would Yentl have done in America? Worked in a sweatshop 12 hours a day where there is no time for learning? Would she try to marry a salesman in New York, move to the Bronx or to Brooklyn and rent an apartment with an ice box and a dumbwaiter?”

To Singer the essence of Yentl is “her sacrifice, her great passion for spiritual achievement”. Female sacrifice was, after all, a very comfortable idea to men of Singer’s generation.

But characters sometimes develop lives of their own. Streisand’s musical gave Yentl a new life as a self-determining woman, albeit dressed in Hollywood schmaltz.

To these contradictory characters, contemporary creatives need to add questions that neither Singer nor Streisand would have thought to ask: Is there a queer subtext in Avigdor’s attraction to Anshel or Yentl’s attraction to Hadass? Does Yentl want to be a free woman or a trans man? Is her sense of living in the wrong body the pain of gender dysphoria or a reflection of the limits of her society?

Co-creator and director Gary Abrahams said he wanted to create a production which could raise all these questions but leave the answers open.  

“Is it a trans story? A queer story? A feminist story? Where we have ultimately landed is that there are multiple prisms and lenses through which to view this show and it’s not our job to decide. People will bring their own lenses to the show.

“Theatre is a place where you pose questions, and you look at those questions from every possible viewpoint, but I don’t think its our job to answer them or to have an agenda. We need to stay with the ambiguity,” he says.

This Yentl is not a rendition of the charming and light-hearted film, but a darker and sexier production, populated with the demons, dybbuks and ghosts of Singer’s kabbalah-infused imagination. Audiences may be confronted by the vivid dreams and sexual imagery.

Abrahams says the creators wanted to find theatrical language to deal with spiritual aspects of the story.  “Bashevis Singer was a learned scholar, and his work is imbued with the images, symbols of motifs of kabbalistic mythology. We wanted to be able to conjure the mood of the shtetl, but we didn’t want it to feel like a museum piece,” he says.

Selective use of Yiddish – with surtitles – is interwoven in the production evoking the cultural context but also allowing the director to play with its theatrical possibilities. “It’s such an onomatopoeic language, such a musical expressive language, that even if you don’t speak Yiddish it can be really powerful,” says Abrahams.

Most of the cast are Jewish but few knew any Yiddish so getting the language – and much of the cultural context – right has been a challenge.

But the production has already been a remarkable success. Its first outing won four Green room awards and its transition from a community theatre production to the Arts Centre to a mainstage revival is unusual.

A diverse audience from Kadimah’s traditional audience of ageing Yiddishists, the LGBTQI+ communities both within and beyond the Jewish community, to Melbourne’s regular cultural consumers is embracing Yiddish theatre.