Looking Forward to the World Premiere of "Aviva Vs. the Dybbuk"

Q & A with Musical Director & Composer Ben Boeker 

In his seventh year as a Musical Director in the Theater Department and in his 14th year total at Usdan, Ben Boecker's musical adaptation of the book, “Aviva vs. the Dybbuk,” written entirely on guitar, will premiere on the Lucy Moses Stage on Thursday, July 24.   

“Aviva vs. the Dybbuk” is the fourth commissioned piece to premiere at Usdan and the first of two commissioned pieces this season. Ben along with Theater Chair Jim Incorvaia run Usdan’s evolving Commissioning Program, offering students the opportunity to engage with new work with the support of Theater faculty.

“It's rare that kids get to do high quality, original work that they can really delve into on an artistic level,” Ben shared. “There's really nothing like it. You can't go on YouTube to look how someone sang your song. You can't copy. You have to come up with it all on your own.”

With next week’s premiere coming up, we sat down with Ben to hear more about bringing his original piece alive at Usdan.

Could you speak about next week’s show? 

Ben: “Aviva vs. the Dybbuk” is based on a book that deals with a child's view on grief — a very imaginative child's view on grief. That's been something else we've been trying to do with the commissioning program is targeted different issues that are important to kids through the work that we're doing, so that they can experience them through the work that they're creating and acting and performing and really speak about a child's journey through those issues.

How have you seen “Aviva vs. the Dybbuk” come to life since you started rehearsing with your class?

Ben: The project evolved once we brought the script to camp through a process of the two table reads we did with the faculty in the spring. Then we brought it to the kids in the first week of camp, and it began changing almost immediately.

I love working with kids because they say what's on their mind — the kids at Usdan are very expressive, and they say what's on their mind. They ask questions and things started changing almost immediately. We just we brought the author in last week and she talked with the kids. So, we had a Q & A that helped inspire some of the ideas behind the piece, and we've now made some small shifts about the ambiguity around loss and grief, which was a big point of conversation that we had with the author and with the kids. So, we wanted to create that thread through the story as well. 

What was the process of like sort of adding that layer of music to the book?

Ben: The musicality of this piece was fascinating. The book takes place in the Orthodox Jewish community, and one of my many jobs as an artist is to be a song leader for a synagogue in my neighborhood, where I play the guitar for the Shabbat services. When I started working on this project, I knew that I wanted to write it on guitar because that was a connection to the Jewish community for me, that would allow me to sort of access that musical world. I rarely write an entire show on guitar. I'm much more facile pianist, but it's really inspiring and challenging to write on a new instrument, and it creates all sorts of new sounds that you maybe wouldn't typically come by as a composer.

So that was a terrific experience. I had a great time just strumming. It's almost a Bob Dylan kind of vibe mixed with some Jewish traditions in terms of chord progressions, like those that would accompany typical Jewish folk and spiritual songs.

Could you speak a little bit about the commissioning program more broadly?

Ben: The Commissioning Program started four summers ago after Jim [Incorvaia], the Senior Chair of the Theater Department, reached out to me to bring an original piece to the camp. That piece was called “My True Love.” The kids really enjoyed it, I think to all our surprise. Carolyn, my director, and I were probably the most shocked. The response from the kids was so good that Jim and Lauren Brandt-Schloss reached out to me to ask me to create something for the camp specifically, which was then called “Camp U.” We did that piece the following year.

It was inspired by my time at Usdan and is very camp-oriented with different camp activities and the emotions of what it feels like to be a camper, especially in your last summer at camp.

“Camp U” was very comedic and had lots of small parts because we have these big casts with kids with different skill levels. So that was kind of the goal of that piece. Then last summer we did “Better Than A Bully,” which was based on a book written by a Usdan alum. That also had a lot of small parts and was structured in a similar way where there's one main character, but it takes us through a lot of other characters’ journeys along the way and how they're dealing with bullying.

And here we are in the third year of the commissioning program. We've now actually added another commissioned artist, so there'll be two commissioned pieces this summer.

[The original work “KABLAM!” by Billy Recce will premiere Thursday, August 21.]

How did your experience as a student at Usdan lead you to this kind of work as a composer?

My major was always either Chorus or Musical Theater, but my minor changed a few times. I did Creative Writing, I did Chess, and one summer, I took Guitar and the Guitar that I actually brought with me to Usdan this year to accompany the rehearsals is the same guitar that I learned on when I was a kid here at Usdan. I have a new guitar now, which I'll bring for the performances, but during the rehearsals I'm using my old guitar. In fact, the case that I carried it in still has my instrument check tag on it. So, I first started writing songs when I was here as a camper, and one of the early songs I wrote was about camp.

How does your piece relate to the themes Love, Air, and Butterfly?

Flight specifically is a connection to the Butterfly theme, and Love is a huge part of the story. The emotional climax of the show is these two characters expressing their love for the person they lost. The story is called “Aviva vs. Dybbuk,” and the dybbuk is a folkloric ghost from Jewish traditions, a spirit that stayed behind after death with unfinished business. And in the book, the author talks about how the dybbuk flies. It flies through the air. And when Aviva is playing her favorite game — a variant on dodgeball — she imagines herself as the dybbuk flying through the air, throwing the ball and playing the game.

The last song in the show is called, “Flying Through,” and it's all about how, now that we've dealt with these emotions and we've dealt with the heavy, difficult parts of grief and accepted the reality of what our life is, we can fly through the challenges and obstacles that come to us.

Anything else you’d like to share about the upcoming show?

Yes, I'll say I'm very grateful for the collaborators that I get to work with. One of the really important collaborators on this is my director, Rob Gallagher. He is a fantastic director, and this is our second original work that we've done together. He helps clarify things so much. Just working with him has been so helpful.