The figure of the haunted wanderer appears again and again in Jewish narratives. When I reflect on my own relationship with Jewish identity, I find it impossible to separate myself from this status of being between worlds.

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We’ve all been dybbuks in one form or another. We pass through liminal spaces...stages of transformation, loneliness, grief, uncertainty. We possess whatever bodies--personas, communities, obsessions, purposes—we believe might bring us relief from our wandering. This project has been an act of leaning into that condition and asking what it means to claim an excavated identity as one’s own.

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I was drawn to S. Ansky as a playwright because of his complex position as a folklorist of his own people. There is a strange distance in that role—the stance of an anthropologist toward one’s own culture. But Ansky was more than an archivist. His work is alive with critique, yearning, and demands for change. In The Dybbuk, his use of Jewish folklore becomes a vehicle not just for preservation, but for progress—a way to honor the past while insisting on a future for a threatened people.

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Ansky strengthened his community by inserting his singular voice into a fractured lineage. In this project, I’ve tried to listen for what my own voice sounds like in the cacophony of wandering singers. I’ve followed instinctual pulls toward images, sounds, and questions that speak to whatever it is inside me that I call "Jewish."

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At the heart of this production concept is an idea that Leah's death at the hands of the contaminating spirit would transform her into a tree. I was drawn to the body horror of that metamorphosis—the perversion of her humanity as she becomes a symbol of rootedness and growth. The image of a tree, its tendrils blindly stretching toward the sun, mirrors the haunted movement of those of us caught in our states of wandering.

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But for every branch that reaches upward, there is an unseen network of roots stretching below—anchoring and connecting us to something ancient. We are all part of that underground tangle, a lineage of haunted wanderers searching for rest and belonging. We are wretched, lost creatures of the threshold. And, in our collective wandering, we find a strange kind of home.