Friday, February 17, 2006; Page WE20

'The Dybbuk': Spirited Movement
By Lisa Traiger
Special to The Washington Post

They call it the Factory. There are no assembly lines, just the chaos of a thrift shop filled with mismatched sofas, lamps with no shades, a stack of backless theater seats, mirrored pillars, dust everywhere and enough inventory to furnish a dozen houses.

In this artless jumble, located in a former furniture store in the Shirlington section of Arlington, the creative juices flow, and often astonishing theater, music and dance get made by dint of a zealous group of performers. They work under the astute, sometimes imperious, gaze of Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, founders of Synetic Theater, a company committed to melding the distinctive movement- and character-driven theatrical traditions of Russia and Georgia and a more American, realistic style of performance.

Irina Tsikurishvili stars as Leah, with Dan Istrate as David, in the world premiere adaptation of "The Dybbuk," by Synetic Theater at Theater J. (By Raymond Gniewek)

This week the husband-and-wife team, in a production with Theater J, brings a world premiere adaptation of one of the most intriguing and well-known works of the Yiddish stage to Goldman Theater at the Washington D.C. Jewish Community Center.

"The Dybbuk," by all accounts, was a stunning and groundbreaking production at its Moscow premiere in 1914. Written by S. Anski, an early-20th-century ethnologist who traveled throughout Eastern Europe documenting Old World traditions and superstitions of shtetl -dwelling Jews, the play included the tale of a mystical rabbi from Miropol who exorcised a dybbuk ( Yiddish for a spirit that attaches itself to a living person) from a bride.

"The Dybbuk" remains a powerful and evocative piece of theater, with its passionate story of Leah (Irina Tsikurishvili), whose love for Kabbalistic scholar Chonnon (Andrew Zox) is thwarted by her misguided but caring father (Irakli Kavsadze). Director Paata Tsikurishvili, joined by Theater J Literary Director Hannah Hessel, is adapting the play with an eye toward emphasizing the tension between the corporeal and spiritual worlds. Like the original "Dybbuk," and Synetic's other productions, choreography and movement will be essential.

The 1922 "Dybbuk" revival by the Hebrew-speaking Habima Theater in Moscow, now based in Tel Aviv, was directed by Yevgeny Vakhtangov, a pupil of Constantin Stanislavsky, the famed Russian director, teacher, actor and co-founder of the Moscow Art Theater. The production was so critically lauded and popular that it played more than 1,000 times and toured worldwide. To this day, some say the current Habima troupe has never had a production live up to its artistic success. Many versions -- from a 1937 movie filmed in Poland to a recent opera -- have been made over the years. Even Jerome Robbins's choreography for "Fiddler on the Roof" gives a nod to "The Dybbuk's" Hasidic wedding dances and a chilling Totentanz , a medieval dance of death done in the cemetery dream sequence; an Israeli revival of the play was running on Broadway as Robbins was choreographing "Fiddler" in 1964.

For the Synetic production, Irina Tsikurishvili turns to her roots in Georgia. "Because people know European Jewish tradition so much," she explains, "we decided to show Georgian Jewish tradition, because in Georgia we have many Jewish people: They're Jewish, but they have some Georgian traditions . . . the dance life mixes with our tradition -- they're Georgian and Jewish."

As Leah, the bride possessed by the dybbuk, Irina says she worries that she hasn't yet focused on how she will portray a woman overcome by the spirit of the man she loves. "Sometimes I play a character who has evil spirit within, and that's so easy to act," she remarks, "you just go" . . . and she growls, grimacing and baring her teeth as she did in last fall's Synetic production of "Dracula."

"But here you cannot do that," she ponders. "Here it's the man she loves [who is] in her, so it's a real challenge. It's an exorcism, taking the soul out, but it isn't of an evil person, it's an exorcism of who she loves. It's so interesting for me to look at how she would feel like, this person. She's happy and she's devoted, and there's this life for her. And then the second part, other people try to save her, play God and remove that soul from her. It's so interesting, so untypical."
The Dybbuk Theater J 800-494-8497 Through March 19