“The Books of Jacob” is a work of theater unlike any I’ve ever attended, a production more ambitious than any I can remember, one that is almost too complicated to explain. The performances, presented for free this weekend, are taking place on stage at La MaMa ETC (from 1 to 2:30 p.m.)  and simultaneously at theaters in five other countries, as well as online as a live stream and in Virtual Reality. The story that inspired this tech-savvy experiment begins with the fascinating Old World historical figure of Jacob Frank. 

Born Jewish in what was then Poland (now Ukraine) in the early 18th century, Jacob Frank declared himself a messiah in his early thirties, and led a religious movement that rejected traditional Judaism and at various times embraced Islam and Christianity.  He was jailed for some dozen years as a heretic, which only increased his influence among his followers and heads of state throughout Europe. 

“I am neither simply a Jew, nor a Christian, nor a heretic,” we hear Jacob say as we sit in the audience at La MaMa.  “I am all of these things and none of these things at the same time. Within me, Shekinah and Mary, Christ and the Messiah, are joined, not as separate figures, but as facets of one divine reality. My transformations are not betrayals; they are revelations. Every time I change, I show another aspect of the Hidden Truth that so many seek, yet so few find.”

Jacob goes on: “My role is not to fix certainties in stone, but to remind others that every certainty can be transcended. What you call betrayal, I call transcendence. What you see as change, I see as divine fluidity.”

I choose these lines to excerpt because, even as they reflect a hard-to-grasp theology, the language is straightforward and accessible (only one word may be unfamiliar to some New York theatergoers: “Shekhinah is a Hebrew word that means ‘dwelling’ or ‘settling’ and is used in Judaism to describe the presence of God in the world.”)

But the audience who hears these words, recited by different Jacobs in different countries, sees this:

That is a screenshot I took of the live stream, which allows for captioning. I watched the first performance in person at La MaMa and the visuals were even more…elusive. (No captioning was the least of it.) The actual set at La MaMa — lets call it the three-dimensional set — includes some enlarged Hebrew letters, and a cable strung above the stage, to which one of the two performers, Rébecca Pierrot, occasionally attached herself. But two screens dominated the stage. The other performer, Tomasz Rodowicz, stood behind one of the screens, which was translucent. He wore a dirty pinkish rag of a robe, and a VR headset, and occasionally looked anguished. I’m assuming Rodowicz was Jacob, but Pierrot was more obviously reading the script, from a smart phone she held.

Meanwhile, the two screens were busy with…activity, never completely discernible, undertaken by a confusion of figures. These were largely all-white avatars that looked like naked department store manikins. (These figures were even more dominant if you donned one of the three Virtual Reality headsets available during the show at La MaMa for any audience member to try out.)

On the screens (but not via the VR sets) there were also balloon-like heads floating by; these were carefully reproduced facsimiles of the actual faces of the performers from the other countries, who were speaking their lines in their native language. There was also occasional live glimpses of the stages in these other countries, which for the record were Poland, Serbia, Greece, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.

I wondered if the theatergoers watching in these other countries were scratching their heads at the goings-on, although I also wondered whether that’s just something people say in English.

Long before the performance I attended of “The Books of Jacob” had come to an end, the in-person audience at La MaMa, which had numbered perhaps fifty at the start, had thinned to fewer than half.  The two Polish ladies of a certain age to whom I had talked before the show were among the hearty few who had stayed; one told me how much she enjoyed it. 

That bears some explaining. The whole show deserves an explanation, rather than a review, because the story behind this unusual theatrical endeavor was far more intriguing than the results were satisfying.

In 2014, the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk wrote a novel inspired by Jacob Frank’s biography –“Ksiegi Jakubowe,” (Polish for “The Books of Jacob”) widely considered her magnum opus, singled out by the Swedish Academy when it awarded her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018.

She has been an extremely popular writer in Poland for decades, as the two Polish theatergoers explained to me.

Five years ago, a Polish theater director named Krzysztof Garbaczewski began reading Tokarczuk’s novel. That’s how he put it to me when I talked to him after the performance, and it was at first unclear whether he meant it has taken him that long to finish it. This would not be unusual. Reviewing the 2022 English translation of “The Books of Jacob,” NY Times book critic Dwight Garner called the 1,000-page epic novel, “an unruly, overwhelming, vastly eccentric novel” that “I’m glad to have had the experience [of reading] — and equally glad that it’s over.”

Even the subtitle is overwhelming: ““A Fantastic Journey Across Seven Borders, Five Languages, and Three Major Religions, Not Counting the Minor Sects. Told by the Dead, Supplemented by the Author, Drawing From a Range of Books, and Aided by Imagination, the Which Being the Greatest Natural Gift of Any Person. That the Wise Might Have It for a Record, That My Compatriots Reflect, Laypersons Gain Some Understanding, and Melancholy Souls Obtain Some Slight Enjoyment.”

Garbaczewski told me that he was completely taken with the unfamiliar worlds that the historical novel had opened up to him, the world of Jewish life in Poland before the Holocaust, the world of Jewish mysticism, in which “everything is connected to everything; we are one form of fluid identity.”

For about as long as Garbaczewski has been reading Tokarczuk’s novel, the director has focused (as his bio puts it) on “developing a new theatrical language that incorporates virtual 3D environments, avatars, virtual scenography, and live actors.”

And so this is how the cutting edge director, in partnership with Polish Cultural Institute NYC and CultureHub, chose to adapt the Nobel laureate’s already dense and arcane storytelling.

If the use of VR etc were not complicated enough, the script of the play (put together by Rébecca Pierrot, who’s French) is organized thematically, not as a chronological narrative — with one exception. Reflecting the expansive time frame of the novel, which ranges some two centuries, from the time of Jacob Frank to the Holocaust, there is a compelling passage at the end that tells the story of  five Jewish families from the village of Korolowka, who escaped being rounded up by the Germans by hiding in a cave in a nearby forest for two years. It is a story that might have worked better as a simple monologue, without the distracting VR and other images. In any case, by then, there were few theatergoers who remained to hear it. 

Garbaczewski seemed so amiable, open-minded and articulate in our sponteanous conversation after the performance that I gently asked him whether he had noticed what had happened to the audience during the show.

“I was focused on the VR,” he explained (he was off to the side in front of a computer)

I told him that many had walked out.

“It’s an experiment,” he said mildly. He said in effect that in the future advances in the technology could make the avatars more lifelike and better integrated with the live actors.

He even happily answered my question about the expression that Polish people use to say they’re baffled; the audience members don’t scratch their heads; in Polish slang (loosely interpreted), knives cut into their brains.