For Gary Abrahams, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl begins not with disguise, but with something more unsettling: possession.
As the co-writer and director of Yentl and executive director of Kadimah Yiddish Theatre in Melbourne, Abrahams recalls being struck by the way Yentl seems, at moments, overtaken by a force beyond her control. As she assumes a male identity and moves deeper into deception, each step demands further transgression, emotionally, socially and spiritually.
“In the story, it feels like she’s overtaken by another spirit,” he says. “That image really stuck with me.”
That idea led him toward Jewish folklore – dybbuks, spirits, and the language of haunting. What emerged was a reading of Yentl as a kind of psychological and spiritual gothic, rooted in contradiction: the experience of feeling entirely right within oneself while the world insists otherwise.
“When somebody feels fully as they are meant to be, but the world pushes against it at every angle, that contradiction, for me, feels very exciting theatrically.”
This tension is intensified, he suggests, by the religious world of the shtetl, where life is lived under constant divine scrutiny. God is always present, observing, judging, guiding.
“That evokes a kind of horror,” he says. “When I think about living like that.”
Externalising the inner voice: the Yetzer Hara
This sense of inner conflict led to one of the production’s defining elements: the embodiment of the Yetzer Hara (יֵצֶר הָרַע), often translated as the “evil inclination,” but more accurately understood as the human impulse toward desire, rebellion, and transgression: the force that pushes us beyond accepted boundaries.
In Abrahams’ staging, this inner voice is given physical presence on stage, hovering close to Yentl, observing, provoking, and at times guiding her actions.
In early development, Abrahams focused on the central relationships between Yentl, Avigdor and Hodes. But something was missing — a way to bring Yentl’s internal struggle into theatrical form.
“I wanted to find a way of externalising that,” he says. “I like theatre that is unapologetically theatrical.”
Rejecting strict realism, he turned toward a more expressive theatrical language, drawing on European traditions and Brechtian devices. The Yetzer Hara offered a way to embody Yentl’s inner argument, not as abstraction, but as a living, active presence within the world of the play.
For Abrahams, the term is frequently misunderstood. It does not simply denote evil, but rather the restless, boundary-pushing aspect of the self.
“Without the rebels of the world, we don’t break boundaries. We don’t push forward.”
This idea reshapes his understanding of Yentl. Rather than simply deceiving those around her, she becomes a figure of transformation — someone whose transgression opens new possibilities within tradition.
“I saw Yentl as someone who has to go through enormous trial and tribulation to claim herself and her truth,” he says. “That doesn’t take her away from Judaism, it lights a fire.”
A story of wholeness, not resolution
Abrahams resists fixed interpretations of Yentl’s identity. While contemporary audiences often read the story through the lens of trans identity, he is more interested in its ambiguity.
“She doesn’t need to fully identify as a woman or as a man,” he says. “She just is herself.”
In his view, the story moves toward a form of wholeness rather than categorisation. By the end, Yentl is no longer disguising herself but inhabiting a fuller self that includes contradiction.
“At the end, she says: ‘I am neither one nor the other, and I must live myself as I am.’ I think she’s happy. She’s going, I am both. I am whole.”
This refusal to resolve identity neatly is, for Abrahams, essential, not only to the story, but to Jewish thought itself.
“Judaism doesn’t answer the questions. It poses the questions. There’s never a fixed answer.”
Ritual and transgression
The production’s final image brings these ideas into sharp focus: Yentl laying tefillin.
Traditionally, tefillin -leather straps and small boxes containing Torah passages – are worn by men during daily prayer. The act is closely tied to male religious identity and remains taboo for women in many communities.
“It is absolutely taboo for a woman to do that,” Abrahams says.
That is precisely why he chose it. The image of a female performer laying tefillin while singing a prayer, one she has adapted to shift the gender of God, becomes a concentrated expression of the play’s themes.
“It’s a very transgressive act that sums up the story.”
Yet the moment is not only about defiance. It marks a shift in Yentl’s understanding of herself. Earlier, she believes she is a mistake “even heaven makes mistakes.” By the end, she arrives at acceptance.
“She understands there is no mistake. She was made the way she is in order to break through boundaries and open something new.”
The gesture becomes both rebellion and affirmation.
“She thanks God for making her exactly as she is. Self-acceptance.”
Desire, knowledge and the body
While Yentl’s intellectual hunger drives the narrative, Abrahams does not separate it from desire or physical experience. For him, the story turns on the tension between what he calls the spiritual and the animal sides of the human being.
“No human being is purely spiritual or purely animal,” he says.
Entering the male world does not simply grant Yentl access to study. It exposes her to embodiment, intimacy and desire. In his reading, she loves both Hadass and Avigdor, though in different ways.
“I think you can’t separate the emotional from the spiritual,” he says. “Her thirst for knowledge is also a thirst to understand herself.”
This complexity is one reason he was drawn to the unresolved, even uncomfortable aspects of Singer’s original story.
“It’s messy, it’s contradictory, it’s chaotic,” he says. “It’s a tragedy for all three figures.”
There is no clear hero, no clean resolution – only human entanglement.
Theatre as a Jewish form
Abrahams sees a deep connection between Jewish culture and theatrical form. For him, Judaism is inherently performative: a tradition of storytelling, repetition and reinterpretation.
“It’s all about stories that we retell year after year,” he says. “Each time we come back to them, we understand them more deeply.”
He also points to the structure of Jewish texts, the shifting voices and modes of the Torah, Talmud and Gemara, as an influence on the production’s dramaturgy.
“We don’t tell the story in a single straight line. We shift modes, perspectives, forms. That feels very Jewish to me.”
Language, memory and reinvention
Abrahams’ connection to Yiddish theatre is both personal and rediscovered. Growing up in South Africa, he heard Yiddish spoken by his grandparents but did not learn it. At the time, it felt like a private, almost secret language.
Only later, through his work with Kadimah Yiddish Theatre, did he come to appreciate its richness.
“It’s the language of great writers, poets, philosophers,” he says. “It’s incredibly expressive, you can’t always translate it, you have to embody it.”
As executive director, he is committed not only to preserving Yiddish, but to reactivating it within contemporary culture.
A shared space
Despite its specific cultural roots, Yentl has drawn remarkably diverse audiences. Abrahams recalls performances in Australia where Orthodox Jews, queer audiences and the general public sat side by side.
“It became a real shared space,” he says.
For him, accessibility lies not in simplifying the material, but in grounding it in a clear human premise: a person denied access to knowledge, forced to transgress in order to become themselves.
Beyond that, he invites audiences to embrace a more poetic mode of engagement. His staging—ladders, symbolic architecture, echoes of Chagall and biblical imagery—is designed not to explain everything, but to provoke curiosity.
“I’m not interested in literalism,” he says. “I want to create an experience that makes people ask: what is that?”
In Abrahams’ Yentl, the answer is never singular. The story remains open, unstable, unresolved, and therefore alive.
“I am both,” Yentl says. “I am whole.”
Until: Sunday 12 April 2026