Vilna Troupe

The Vilna Troupe was an international modernist theatrical sensation with inauspicious origins. Shortly after the outset of World War I, a small cohort of impoverished and unemployed Jewish actors, untrained teenagers, and war émigrés formed a nomadic Yiddish theater troupe in what was then German-occupied Vilna. By 1935 the Vilna Troupe had grown to about 250 actors and splintered into several independent subcompanies. Always on the move, their avant-garde Yiddish productions captivated Jewish and non-Jewish audiences throughout the troupe’s travels across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Australia. Their ability to adapt and disseminate global aesthetic innovations across national, cultural, and linguistic borders made the Vilna Troupe an essential contributor to global theatrical modernisms. The Vilna Troupe was the first company to stage the Yiddish version of Sh. An-ski’s The Dybbuk (1920).