Vilna Troupe

Vilna Troupe, company founded in Vilna, Lithuania, in 1916 to further the reform of the Yiddish stage inaugurated by Hirschbein. The troupe's first (amateur) production was Sholom Asch's Landsleute. A year later it moved to Warsaw and became professional, soon being recognized as one of the outstanding Yiddish companies of its day, mainly because of the excellence of its ensemble playing. Among its directors was David Hermann (1876–1930), who was responsible for the first production of Peretz's dramatic poem Night in the Old Market. His finest work, however, was his production in Yiddish, a month after the author's death in 1920, of Ansky's The Dybbuk, with which the troupe toured France, England, and America, winning international renown. Returning to Warsaw in 1924, the troupe found it had lost its theatre, and shortly afterwards moved to Vienna, where it split in two, some of the actors going to join Maurice Schwartz in New York, others remaining active in Europe, particularly in Romania and Poland, until the 1930s. The repertory of the Vilna Troupe was at first fairly extensive and included a number of Yiddish classics; but later it became exclusively associated with and dependent on The Dybbuk, which probably accounted for its eventual demise.