NIGHT STORIES Will Make Its Off-Broadway Premiere At Wild Project Beginning December 17

NIGHT STORIES will make its Off-Broadway premiere at Wild Project beginning Wednesday, December 17, following performances in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires. The production, located at 195 E. 3rd Street, will run through Sunday, January 11. The work presents four tales of reanimation drawn from the writings of Avrom Sutzkever, performed in Yiddish with English supertitles.

The production includes Where the Stars Spend the Night, A Child’s Hands, Lupus, and Portrait in Blue Sweater. Each piece examines the resurfacing of figures from the Holocaust who appear to the writer at night, revealing their stories, their destruction, and their complicated survival. In these encounters, Sutzkever’s characters describe their fates, seek forgiveness, or return unexpectedly, including the reappearance of a lost portrait that once belonged to the poet.

Starring Shane Baker and Miryem-Khaye Seigel, NIGHT STORIES is directed by Moshe Yassur with Beate Hein Bennett. Original music is composed by Uri Schreter. The production is presented by the Congress for Jewish Culture.

Avrom Sutzkever (1913–2010), described by The New York Times as “the greatest poet of the Holocaust,” was born in Smorgon and spent his childhood in Siberia during World War I before settling in Vilna. A member of the Yung-Vilne literary circle, he was active in resistance efforts during World War II, smuggling cultural materials out of Nazi control while composing poetry in the Vilna Ghetto. After the war he testified at the Nuremberg trials and later founded the journal Di Goldene Keyt in Israel, where many of the tales featured in NIGHT STORIES first appeared.

Shane Baker is known for his Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot and has appeared in productions such as Bashevis’s Demons, Tevye Served Raw, and Everett Quinton’s stagings of Charles Ludlam’s Galas and Conquest of the Universe or When Queens Collide. He received the Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Award in 2020.

Miryem-Khaye Seigel is a Yiddish singer, songwriter, actor, and scholar whose work spans performance, recordings, and research. She has appeared internationally, released the album Toyznt Tamen, and co-edited Women on the Yiddish Stage.

Director Moshe Yassur, born in Iassy, Romania, has worked extensively in both Yiddish and modernist theatre, including collaborations with Jean-Marie Serreau in Paris and Woody King Jr. in New York. Beate Hein Bennett holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and previously co-directed Bashevis’s Demons and served as dramaturg and designer for recent Yiddish productions of Waiting for Godot and Death of a Salesman.

The Congress for Jewish Culture, established in 1948, promotes Yiddish culture and literature internationally. Its publishing history includes works by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kadia Molodowsky, and Chaim Grade, and it is currently creating an online database of its archival materials.

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