"The Legend of Baal Shem"

Village Voice , June 11, 1996

By David Finkle

When Paul Sill's Story Theatre opened on Broadway in 1970, there were a few minutes when we thought dramatic literature was being revolutionized. Sills's work was seminal -fresh, stripped down, a testament to actors' abilities. But far from sowing the seeds of destruction for traditional forms, it flashed across theatrical skies and then dimmed. It's still viable entertainment though, as proven by The Legend of the Baal Shem, which Sills devised with the new Actors Workshop graduating class. The source material was Martin Buber's versions of Hasidic folk tales, and what was especially beautiful about the choice was that it returned these mysterious stories of faith tested, lost, and rediscovered to their origins as word-of-mouth narratives. Shrewdly, Sills and his young collaborators at the school he co-founded made Legend, in its democratic apportioning of fluid lines and actions, a metaphor for 18th-century Hasidism, when religion was reclaimed from the intellectual elite and given back to the people as a source of enlightenment and joy.

Click on picture for larger view.

| Back to Press Clippings |