Motl shares with us how he learned Yiddish and the journey that led him to working at NYTF. We also speak with him about the Folksbiene's online programming during quarantine and his thoughts on the future of live theater in these uncertain times. Finally, he dishes on what it was like working with Joel Grey on Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish! NOTE: there are some sound quality issues with this episode which was recorded remotely: we have also provided a typed up transcript.
National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene
Elyssa and Lauren
Hi, I'm Elyssa Nicole Trust, an actor and writer living in New York City. Hey, I'm Lauren Schaffel an actress and producer, also living in New York City. And we are Positive Creativity Podcast!
Elyssa
Positive Creativity is a podcast where we speak with writers, directors and other artists about what they're working on, what's inspiring them and how they stay positive in this industry.
Lauren
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Lauren
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Lauren
Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you with support from Ahava Theatre company.
Lauren
MATTHEW “MOTL” DIDNER is the Associate Artistic Director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene. He’s the Associate Director of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish (Winner of Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel Awards) directed by Joel Grey., Co-director The Golden Bride (Drama Desk Award Nominated: Outstanding Revival of a Musical and Outstanding Direction of a Musical). Other directing credits include The Sorceress, Fyvush Finkel Live! (Drama Desk Award–nominated: Outstanding Musical Revue), Robert Brustein’s The King of Second Avenue, The Pushcart Peddlers and The Marriage Contract.
Motl
Hi, how's everybody doing?
Elyssa
We're doing as well as we can be. How are you?
Motl
I guess that's the state of things these days.
Elyssa
So, to begin, can you tell us about your background? Did you grow up speaking Yiddish?
Motl
I did not. I grew up in suburban New Jersey. My grandparents were all Yiddish speakers. On my father's side, he was first generation American. On my mother's side, my grandparents were born here. My great grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, and they were all Yiddish speakers. And it was something that was sort of in the background of our family life. I remember a lot of Yiddish words obviously mixed in to the English as my grandparents and even as my parents spoke it. I went to an American Hebrew school, not a day school, but like, after school. The Sunday kind.
Lauren
Sounds familiar.
Motl
Yeah. I was bar mitzvah'd. And then I stayed on through confirmation. We went to a conservative synagogue until I was 8 and then my family moved to a different town. It was just more convenient to go to the reform. So we went to the Reform Synagogue where I was Bar Mitzvah'd. So, you know, I learned then what I would call “Bar Mitzvah Hebrew”, not really conversational Hebrew, but both prayer and what it meant. And there was almost no Yiddish content there. The few Yiddish words that we learned we didn't even know were Yiddish, you know, like dreidel, latkes, and things like that. We never really specifically identified them as Yiddish words. But my grandparents were much more culturally Jewish than religious, and they lived in Stuyvesant Town when I was little. And we used to go there pretty much every Sunday and have lunch with them. Stuyvesant Town, for those not from New York City, is on the east side starting around 14th Street. So it's just above what's now considered East Village, but used to be sort of the hub of Jewish cultural life. So we used to go to the Second Avenue Deli back when it was actually on Second Avenue and 9th Street. And that's where the Yiddish Theatre Walk of Fame is so on the sidewalk they have stars, sort of like the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but with Yiddish Theatre Stars. And we used to go there for lunch pretty much every week. And we would sit in what they called the Molly Picon room, which was a room, which had a sort of a small dining room off to the side. And it had a lot of Yiddish theater posters all over the walls, especially those that were starring Molly Picon. So I sort of had this awareness that Yiddish theater had been a thing and that it was located in that part of the city. And when I got a little bit older, when I was a teenager, we're talking in the mid 1980s, there was this bilingual Yiddish English show playing Off-Broadway at the Second Avenue Theater called the Golden Land, and my grandmother took me to see that. So that was sort of my first introduction to sort of the nuts and bolts of actually hearing something in another language. And when I was a little bit older than that and started to get into folk music, my grandmother gave me her copy of “Theodore Bikel sings Jewish folk songs.” So that's an entirely Yiddish album. And of course, I didn't understand it, but I sort of had a feel for it.. So I was able to sort of understand what the songs were about. So those were sort of, two early, iconic moments of my entry into the Yiddish cultural world. Later on, when I was in college, I came across several Yiddish plays in English translation. They'd been translated back in the 20s, in the 30s, and they were very stilted. It wasn't anything that in English you could perform as translated. But I was sort of fascinated with the stories. I remember one of them was a family hiding in a cellar during a pogrom. I guess there were one acts. One of them was a family that had bought a phonograph and they were the only ones in the shtetl to have it. And everyone would come over to their house to listen to it, to music. So there were interesting sort of documents of a time and a place that had captured my imagination. Mind you, I had never actually seen any Yiddish theater. I didn't even know that the Folksbiene was still in existence at that point. This was, you know, we're talking early 1990s now and they still had kind of a low profile among the general theater community. I was studying theater at NYU. So it's not like I wasn't in the loop of what was going on in the professional theater world. But back then, they were really still sustained by legacy Yiddish speakers, mostly Holocaust survivors, and children of Holocaust survivors. And they didn't really do a lot of outreach beyond that. So a couple of years later, after I graduated, I was living, of all places, in Richmond, Virginia. I'd gone down to Virginia to do a theater internship and ended up staying down there. I started a theater company that was doing experimental theater and modern dance. And we had a rehearsal. My partner, who I actually grew up with in New Jersey and went to Hebrew School with, I ran the theater and the business and she ran the choreography. And she was a student at Virginia Commonwealth University. And they were kind enough to let us rehearse our shows there. And I remember coming across, as one finds frequently, especially on college campuses, somebody just left a box of books for free, for the taking. And one of them was three great Jewish plays. They were Yiddish plays in translation and the three plays contained were The Dybbuk, The Golem and God of Vengeance, and they were translated by Joseph Landis. And so these were much more in depth than the one act Yiddish plays that I had come across earlier. And they really, really captured my intellect and my heart. And I guess that was sort of that seminal moment that, in a way made a decision that I really wanted to pursue, delving into the original language that they were written in. Especially the Golem. That play is a particularly haunting play. And so it would still be a few more years before I would start to learn Yiddish, but at least the desire for it was implanted at that point. Not easy to find places to learn Yiddish when living in Virginia. So I tried. I got myself one of those teach yourself tapes and it didn't really work out very well. So I moved back to New York in 2002 and it was complete serendipity. I was walking down the street in my neighborhood in Brooklyn and I saw a flyer taped to a lamp post that said, free one hour instant Yiddish class at a local synagogue. And I thought, OK, that sounds like fun. You know, it's something that I've been trying to get into anyway. So I went by. It turns out it was basically like a teaser class for the Workmen's Circle. And I knew about Workmen's Circle. Well, now it's titled The Workers Circle. I'm actually a fourth generation member, but I didn't know that it was an active cultural organization. All I knew about it was that it was a burial society. I knew that my grandparents and great grandparents were all buried in The Working Circle cemetery on Long Island. So to find out that it was still an active organization was very exciting. And I I took the bait and I started taking Yiddish classes weekly at The Workers Circle. And from there, everything sort of came into very sharp focus very quickly. So I had learned that the Folksbiene was still a thing, that it was a professional Yiddish theater in New York. And so I started doing some volunteer work there. And then I took the intensive summer course. At the time it was at Columbia. Now it's at Barnard. But that was like a six week total immersion course. It really was incredibly demanding. You're in classes and at lectures and workshops for eight hours a day, and then you've got four to five hours of homework every night. And so I emerged after six weeks of taking that at a point where I was, I would say, conversational in Yiddish. I took the intermediate level and I was still volunteering with the Folksbiene. And after a few months, a staff position happened to open up in development and they hired me on. And I wrote about a billion grant applications and was focusing on starting an outreach and education program. That was sort of my entree. The very first Folksbeine event that I volunteered for was a gala in spring of 2003 at the 92nd Street Y. And I remember Zalmen Mlotek, the Artistic Director, was speaking at the event. I hadn't met him yet. And he said that, you know, for the future of the organization, we need to start reaching outside of the Yiddish speaking community and engage people and bring them in. And having done DIY theater for several years, during my time in Virginia, the light bulb went off and said, OK, that's what I'm going to do. I myself am an outsider to this world, and I'm going to bring in other outsiders to build up the theater community. So I introduced myself to him at the reception and said, "OK, I'm your guy. I'm going to make this happen." And he's like, "OK, yeah, sure."
Lauren
Look at that.
Motl
"But let's, you know, let's talk another time." So I went in and basically said, well, you know, none of it is going to happen without getting some funding in place. So while I was writing these grants, the focus was on getting the seed money to make that happen. And it took several months. But lo and behold, two funders, the Claims Conference and The David Berg Foundation were willing to donate the seed money to get that started. And that's that. It's been a wild ride ever since.
Elyssa
Wow. That is incredible. So do most of the staff members at NYTF know Yiddish?
Motl
I wouldn't say most. A good number of us do. Obviously, from our artistic team that's Zalmen Mlotek, Artistic Director, I'm The Associate Artistic Director. And Sabina Bruckner is our literary manager. We're all fluent in Yiddish. Our one of our group sales folks, Itzy Firestone is a veteran actor. He's been with the Folksbeine since the mid 1970s. And if he doesn't have a part to play in a show, he sells the group tickets. He's fluent in Yiddish. One of our development folks, Ramona Luka's from Vilnius, or we call it Vilna. She speaks some Yiddish, as does our Director of Finance Hanna Borowik speaks Yiddish as well. That's probably about a little less than half the staff.
Lauren
And I'm curious for the productions that you do, what is the process like teaching the actors Yiddish?
Well, the first step is to identify whether they can speak Yiddish or not, whether they can fake it well. We know that there's not a huge community of actual fluent Yiddish speakers in the theater community. So for auditions, we prepare about a page worth of text and we provide a recording and it's transliteration. Yiddish, of course, is written using the Hebrew alphabet. So we use a standardized transliteration system. So, for example, in English, we don't have a cha sound. So we use k h as this is one of those things like when Hanukkah comes around. The question is always, how do you spell it c, h, kh or the dot under it? Just h? So anyway, so in our system k h is a ha. We break down other things very phonetically. So a "J" sound you would think would be the letter J but it's actually broken down into its component. So it's a d z h is how you end up with a J sound. So it takes some getting used to. Anyway, so we get the recordings out to the actors about a week or so before the auditions it's available. And so we see if they have an ear for it and we don't expect that anyone's going to come in perfect. We work with them at the auditions and give corrections and see if they can retain it and imbue it with, you know, connect the meaning behind the words as opposed to just word, word, word, word word.
And so when we identify those who have a real aptitude for it, we start coaching depending on the show in the role. But for something like Fiddler, I started working with Steven Skye Bell, our Tevye, who had a little bit of Yiddish in his background. We started coaching about a month before rehearsal started. So we would work, we would get together like once a week for a few hours.
Lauren
Right.
Motl
And then the coaching, you know, persists throughout the rehearsal process and even through the previews, you know, the early part of a run. And in some cases, like Fiddler, it never stops because once the show hit long run status, it ran for six months down at the Museum of Jewish Heritage before moving uptown, and we had new people coming into the cast. We had to double our number of understudies so that we had double coverage for every role. We moved uptown, so the coaching was continuous because the understudies, of course, always had to be prepared to go on.
Lauren
Right. Yeah, that kind of blows my mind because the idea of performing in another language, not only do you have to be able to speak your lines, but also to understand the lines that are being spoken to you. So, yeah, that really blows my mind for everyone who is involved in these productions and you coaching as well. That's really an impressive undertaking.
Motl
Yeah, it's you know, it's a rare skill to find. And we're very lucky that we've got a very talented pool of performers in New York. A lot of them have operatic training so they're used to singing in French, Italian, German. And so it's an adjustment, of course, especially the ones who have the hardest time initially are the German speakers who have to unlearn because it's very familiar. But at the same time, there's some big fundamental differences in how some of these sounds are placed. And so they have to kind of unlearn. You know, it can be a pretty big difference.
Elyssa
So obviously, Fiddler was a huge success. Can you talk about what the process was like moving from downtown to Off-Broadway?
Motl
Yeah. First of all, it was an enormous thrill for everybody involved. It was the first time that a Yiddish show had ever made that leap in quite a while. The last Yiddish shows to run on or off Broadway were in the mid-80's. There were those bilingual shows that Zalmen Mlotek and Moishe Rosenfeld had created. Golden Land on Second Avenue. And those were the days. And those were shows that had not started at the Folksbiene.
So historically, the Folksbiene, which has been around since 1915. So we're talking 105 years, had never had a show that successful before that transferred. We've always been a non-profit organization. It's actually an amateur dramatic club of the Workers Circle from 1915 until 1998. But we've never had a show transfer to a commercial run. The theater is gorgeous. It's a 499 seat theatre which makes it one seat shy of a Broadway house. But that was, you know, kind of done on purpose in the interest of keeping the show running longer. So it was a somewhat bigger theater. So there were some adjustments to the staging. And of course, one of the other big adjustments was this whole double coverage thing, which required us to go back and sort of, you know, constant rehearsals we had every week. We had either understudy rehearsals or brush up understudy rehearsals or put in rehearsals if someone was going on for the first time and the coaches would know what became continuous. And then, of course, on the audience side, it brought in a whole different group of people, people who would never have come downtown to see the show were suddenly, you know, flocking to theater. We had, by our reckoning, we had about 50,000 people who saw the show downtown and 100,000 who saw it uptown.
Lauren
Oh, my goodness. That's incredible.
Elyssa
Yeah that's amazing.
Lauren
And what you were talking about earlier with this idea of bringing people outside of a Yiddish-speaking community to come see Yiddish theater. Sounds like you guys accomplished that tenfold.
Motl
Oh, yeah. Up until then, what we had been doing, by the way, you know, to reach out to those audiences was, in 2004 we started something called the Folksbiene Troupe. It was a group of actors, mostly who I had met through YIVO, the summer course. And we were doing Yiddish vaudeville, basically. We were doing sketch comedy and theater songs. And we were taking them all around to communities outside of New York. So we would go to synagogues and JCCs and libraries and colleges and over 50 gated communities in central New Jersey. Again, we'd been to Ohio and to Atlanta, Georgia. And, you know, pretty much anywhere we could. There were people who were interested in putting on a Yiddish show. We've sort of slowed down in recent years. But in the world, it's still a thing. If you saw the one of the Folksbiene live events we did a couple weeks ago, it was some of that material.
We've also built up a whole series of foreign concerts, including Soul to Soul and Traveling Yiddish Land, which have also toured out to venues all over the country. We've been to Canada. We've done three partnerships with the Yiddish theater in Bucharest, Romania. And then we also for 10 years had a partnership with the City University of New York, where we would bring staged readings, concerts, small productions to communities in the boroughs throughout New York City. We've got Queens college and Brooklyn College and Lehman College in the Bronx. Hunter College. And that was sort of a great incubator, a lot of heart. What eventually went on to be mainstage shows, including The Golden Bride. A lot of shows started sort of in that incubator.
Lauren
Yeah, I was curious about that. How do you choose new plays and musicals for the company?
Motl
We have a few different methods. One is investigating classics so works like the The Megillah of Itzik Manger, which was created in Israel in the mid 1960s. And it went on; it actually had a Broadway run in 1968. These are shows that are sort of at the top of the list for, you know, any Yiddishist, you know, in New York. They kind of grew up with these things. So we sort of revisit things, like, Zalmen will say, "oh, I would love that show. Let's do that." You know, let's take a look at The Megillah of Itzik Manger. We get other works brought to us. The Golden Bride was brought to us by a former Harvard librarian who began sort of this research project. He came across a manuscript with the score in the collection at Harvard and spent years sort of piecing the whole score back together again. He found the original libretto, he found the instrumental orchestrations. You know, he counted like pieces of it all over. Some of it was in Medieval archives. Some of it was at UCLA. Some of it was in the Library of Congress. Some of it was at Harvard. And he sort of pieced it back together and brought it to us as a package. And that really inspired us. We had very, very big success. Fiddler would never have happened if not for the success of Golden Bride. So that sort of inspired us to go back to look for other archived material that has never really been put back together again, fully and so the first complete piece we did was The Sorceress. We developed it over a couple of years. And then last December we finally did a fully staged production. And then as far as new work goes, you know, people come to us with projects and you know, we usually start with either a concert version or a staged reading. We've done some very interesting readings in recent years. And in some cases, if there's a potential there, we develop them into a mainstage show.
Elyssa
It's really cool to hear the process and how long it takes.
Motl
Yes. It's you know, it takes a few years usually.
Elyssa
Wow. So, we're recording this in the time of the COVID-19 crisis. And your new online programming, Folksbiene Live!, has been bringing people a lot of joy during this time of isolation. How did you get that together so quickly?
Motl
Well, I remember the day before we shut our office down. It was the middle of March. Our first day working from home was Friday, March 13, and on Thursday, March 12th, one of our marketing team members came up with this idea and said, "well, we're gonna be out of commission for a while. People are going to feel very isolated, and we should come up with a way to take advantage of Facebook live and stream events for them." And we all very enthusiastically agreed to this. We actually started the following week. I think we started on Tuesday or Wednesday. So we got started within less than a week. With Zalmen Mlotek doing a living room concert, he just did about a half hour concert of some favorite Yiddish songs. The technology was very easy to use and that's sort of, you know, set the tone. And then I started doing a series of, I do these, illustrated lectures on the history of Yiddish theater, on the history of the making of Fiddler, etc. I used Zoom and so that I could show the PowerPoint. And then you can stream from Zoom onto Facebook live. So we did that, and then we had, I think, also in the first week, Dylan Hoffman, one of the actors who was in The Sorceress, did a lovely event.
And she came to us through the Yiddish Book Center, and she had a lovely program of reading children's stories and lullabies. And then it sort of, you know, took off from there. We started getting more and more living room concerts. Stephanie Lynne Mason and Drew Seigla, they played Hodel and Perchik in Fiddler. And they're engaged in real life. They got engaged during the run of the show.
Lauren
They're the loveliest.
Motl
Yes, they are. So they did a great concert of love duets. And then Adam Shapiro did a concert from his living room. And Joe Mace, who was in the Golden Bride, and is also on our development team, he did a living room concert and we did our sketch comedy with some Troupe Members. And it's just been sort of taking off. We're finding ways to incorporate supertitles. So, you know, we're just trying to find ways to use the technology. I remember also in the first week, Ben Liebert did a fantastic concert of Alan Sherman songs. And yeah, it's something that keeps our performers engaged and it keeps our audience engaged.
Lauren
Yeah, it sounds like you guys are doing a wonderful job of taking this time and exploring new ways to be creative with this technology and to help keep spirits lifted.
Motl
And we got some great ones coming up. We have again, Daniel Kahn, the international klezmer superstar who's going to be performing. He lives in Berlin. He'll be doing one coming up soon. Zalmen's got another one coming up next week and then the week after that first week of May, we're doing some Yiddish radio plays that we have. There's a great collection of these scripts at the New York Public Library in the Daro Jewish Division.
And so we did them for a stage show that we did years ago. And so we're revisiting some of those scripts written by Nachum Stritchcough that were very prolific, you know. He may have written more than three series, but as far as I know, there were three series that he wrote for the Yiddish radio back in the day and the scripts survived.
Elyssa
As long as people like you are innovating, I have a ton of hope for the future of live theater. That is really special.
Motl
Thank you.
Elyssa
So what does the future of live theater look like coming out of this crisis, in your opinion?
Motl
Well, it's a hard one to answer. Nobody really knows. Even when things start to return somewhat to normal, I imagine it's going to be quite a while before live events, not just theater, but concerts and sporting events before people feel confident enough to return to those. So it's probably going to be a bit of a lag. The current crisis has hit our industry particularly hard. Everywhere in this country and internationally, everyone has canceled more or less their entire spring season. Summer shows are now starting to get canceled. People are starting to think of the fall. So there's really not much work out there. Our next season is mostly going to be reprogramming the things that have to get cut from this current season. So that means that things that we had been hoping for for next season are going to be pushed off for a year beyond that. But, you know, theatre has always been a place for dreamers and innovators. And I imagine that we're going to see a lot of work that comes out that's either a complete escapism so that we can kind of forget this. But I bet there's going to be a lot of work as well that's going to deal with issues of isolation and the inequity that we see as well, especially as the virus is hitting minority communities especially hard. I imagine the same way that there was around the AIDS crisis. There was also an outpouring of creativity, you know, sort of hitting its height with Angels in America. I'm sure that you're going to see some very engaging art that comes as a result of this experience.
Elyssa
Thank you for answering that. I agree with you.
Lauren
Yeah. And I think, again, that's some silver lining, some positivity that comes out of maybe these darker moments like what we're seeing now. So thank you. That made me feel inspired.
Elyssa
So I'm going to have to take it in another direction for a moment, because I know that my future mother-in-law is going to be listening for her question. So can you please tell us, what was it like working with Joel Grey?
Motl
OK. Well, the good news is that Joel was absolutely delightful to work with. He was very supportive of the entire creative team. He really trusts his team to do their jobs, which afforded us a lot of a lot of leeway to do what we do as best as we can. And it all came together under a singular vision. And what else can I tell you about? He's got an incredible sense of humor. He's very generous with his team, not only in terms of his generosity of spirit. You know, some directors, once the show opens, they kind of disappear and just collect the royalties. You don't really hear from them again, except when they bring some big wig to see the show. But Joel kept coming to see the show. He was there for all the celebrations, all the milestones, 100th show and 200th show, 300th show, et cetera. When he brought his, what we call, fancy friends, when he brings people like Bernadette Peters and Hugh Jackman and Carol Burnett and people like that to see the show, he brings them backstage. He introduces them to the company. He makes sure that we all get a picture together. He was so deeply involved in, not just the making of the production, but through the entire run of it. And he still is. We're still all in touch with each other several months after the show is closed. It, of course, was supposed to be, I guess, right now it would have been in China, but that didn't work out so well. Joe just celebrated his 88th birthday, he hasn't slowed down a bit. And we fully expect that he will be very directly involved in all future versions of the production.
Lauren
That's amazing. Happy belated birthday to Joel. Does Joel speak Yiddish?
Motl
He doesn't. And that's I guess, why he kept me around. His father was the great Mickey Katz. He is a very well-known klezmer musician in his own right and also a satirist. So he put out some very, very funny albums. Many of them were parodies. They were American popular songs that he gave sort of a bilingual Yiddish twist to. And so he was very well-known for that. He had a radio show and a touring show called the Borscht Capades. And that's how Joel actually got his start as a teenager. But he didn't speak Yiddish. He had several Yiddish songs in his repertoire, but he didn't speak it conversationally. So, yeah. So I was there as the Associate Director to sort to handle the Yiddish language part of it. The way the show was rehearsed was he would rehearse the scene first in English and the actors had already been coaching on the Yiddish. And what was funny was they weren't on book. So they were sort of, you know, in English, they were paraphrasing the text, but they weren't speaking the original, you know, Joe Stein and Sheldon Harnick words. They were sort of paraphrasing, translating back from Yiddish. So they would work on it in English first to make sure that they understood the emotional life of the scene. And then they would layer the Yiddish back on top of it.
Lauren
Oh, wow. That's fascinating. I think if there's any way to truly feel comfortable speaking in another language, that technique right there adds so many dimensions. That's really cool. Well, Motl, I want to thank you so much for coming on Positive Creativity. It has been a pleasure speaking with you.
Elyssa
Thank you.
Motl
Thank you. It's been a pleasure being here. I look forward to listening to this and other other episodes.
Lauren
Thank you so much for listening. We always love hearing from you. You can email us at positivecreativitypodcast@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram, @positivecreativitypodcast. And for more info on our guest today, please view the show notes. Join us next time on Positive Creativity Podcast.