Enemies: A Love Story – Isaac Bashevis Singer

Theatre of the Society for Macedonian Studies

Premiere: March 25, 2023

The play by Nobel Prize–winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies: A Love Story, will be presented by the State Theatre of Northern Greece at the Theatre of the Society for Macedonian Studies in March. In a stage adaptation by Roy Chen, translated by Leonidas Karatzas, with dramaturgical editing and direction by Stathis Livathinos, the production will premiere on Saturday, March 25. A man attempts to overcome the nightmare—the insurmountable trauma of the Holocaust—and finds himself confronted with the three most important women in his life, searching for passion, love, and redemption.

Stathis Livathinos has previously collaborated with the State Theatre of Northern Greece in 2009, when he directed William Shakespeare’s King Lear in an inspired production that won the acclaim of audiences and critics and was honored with the Theatre Critics’ Award for International Repertoire. Furthermore, in the summer of 2016, with the production of Sophocles’ Antigone directed by Stathis Livathinos, the first collaboration took place between the State Theatre of Northern Greece, the National Theatre of Greece, and the Cyprus Theatre Organisation.

A few words about the play

“Herman… It’s not our fault.
The world around us has fallen apart,
and we are the fragments.”

Herman Broder, of Jewish origin, having survived the Holocaust, lives in New York a few years after the end of World War II. Memories of persecution force him to live in the shadows, constantly protecting his traces. Married to his Polish housemaid who saved his life, he maintains a relationship with Masha, with whom he is in love, while matters become even more complicated when Tamara, his former wife—whom he believed to be dead—appears in the city.

Herman struggles to grasp his own existence in a world where philosophy offers no answers, faith in the progress of humanity has been abandoned, and God is dead. As he seeks ways to regain his footing after trauma, his choices render him accountable both to American law and to morality and God.

The Nobel Prize–winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote the novel Enemies: A Love Story in 1966 in Yiddish. Through the dark world of his characters emerge eroticism, black humor, and profound existential irony—where laughter accompanies misery, when consciousness can no longer rest in comforting narratives. In Roy Chen’s stage adaptation of the novel, Herman is called upon to survive and to balance between guilt and pleasure, unable to make a decision about his life.

Source: National Theatre of Northern Greece